[UPDATED] Telecomhas launched an internal investigation into whether a contact centre agent sentan abusive SMS text to a Wanganui resident.
In a strongly worded pressrelease on his website Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws says a constituent named ‘Vanessa’was sent a text from Telecom’s contact centre which read ‘F*** you customer’. “The message used the Anglo-Saxon obscenityrather than the edited version above,” the statement reads.
Lawsalso expresses concern about the level of customer service following outages onthe XT network - the latest being a text and voice outage for some customers onMonday evening. And he takes aim at Telecom’s move to offshore some of its customerservice operation.
“The level of communications and response to customercomplaints has been abysmal. The move of the call centres to Manila and othersuch places has been a source of frustration and irritation for many consumers,myself included,” the statement reads.
“Vanessadid complain after receiving the offensive text and tracing it to the Telecomcall centre. But that complaint has remained dormant. I’m receiving similartreatment after Telecom voided my e-mail account with neither cause norexplanation. New Zealand is now full of such stories and the resultantindifference.”
Telecomhas responded by launching an internal investigation.
“Thisis a highly unusual occurrence and Telecom is swiftly investigating internallyto verify the complaint. Our customer service teams all set themselves thehighest standards and therefore behaviour such as that reported by Mayor Lawswould equate to serious misconduct,” the statement reads.
“Welook forward to talking to Mr Laws and the customer directly so we can get thedetails and facts needed to address this serious complaint properly andquickly. Telecom has a robust customer complaints process in place and is amember of the Telecommunications Dispute Resolution scheme.”
Meanwhilean update on what organisation will conduct an independent review into the XTnetwork outages is expected to be announced this week.
Update on Thursday 19 February
Telecom has released a statement explaining that aninvestigation has uncovered another fivecustomers who may have received abusive texts.
“Themessages have been sent using a tool called eTXT; eTXT provides the ability tosend a text message to a mobile from a PC. Our fraud and technical teams havebeen working with the eTXT service provider to track where the messages weresent from,” the statement reads.
“eTXT is anonline tool so could potentially be used to send a text message to a mobilefrom a PC anywhere around the world and our fraud team are working to identifythe internet addresses involved."
The Telecomstaff member who holds the number that the texts were allegedly sent from is “not inany way involved in sending the abusive messages.”
"If it is confirmed that the messages were sent by acurrent Telecom employee either from work or home, it would result in swift disciplinary action appropriate for this seriouslevel of misconduct. We have contacted thecustomers who our records show received these eTXTs. We are apologising,assisting them and gathering further information.”