I had a problem with one of my Telstra accounts. I’d inadvertently made a payment on the wrong account and I didn’t pick it up till after I’d made the same mistake the following month.

I couldn’t figure out why Telstra was saying I was in arrears when my bookkeeping program told me I was all paid up. I logged into my bank account and found the error.

Do you think I could get Telstra to do something about it?  I’d spoken to 3 different consultants over a period of a week and each time got told it would get sorted.  I even emailed them via their website and I got a reply email to confirm the payments had been located.

The last consultant I spoke with was a bit on the arrogant side and she told me they couldn’t do that – shift the payments to the right account.  I got very annoyed and demanded to speak to a supervisor (3 times as the consultant was ignoring my requests on the phone).  Eventually she went away and then came back to say the supervisor was in a meeting but would call me back.  I hung up in disgust and wondered what would have happened if the ‘wrong account’ had turned out to be another person, and not my business account. Would they have still refused to shift the payment to the right account?

So, what does any annoyed person do today when they have social media at their fingertips?  They tweet about it.  And very quickly someone at Telstra picked up on it and contacted me.  The guy got my problem sorted very quickly, followed me up by email and by phone and I’m now happy.  Perhaps I should have tweeted earlier!  Oh, and did the supervisor ring me back?  No but in fairness they have may learned that Twitter and @Telstra were sorting it out for me.