Good old Optus are allowing customers to “Go Places” – a new app that lists restaurants in Oz. However, the only ‘places’ Optus appears to be sending its customers to at present is straight to Indian call centres, to the ire of its users.
In fact, the telco has irked customers so much, they have taken to Facebook to set up a page called “Have You Been to India? Na, I’ve spoken to Optus”.

It has over 36,000 likes currently, although it appears to be peopled by some silly comments, it does point to a serious issue within the telco industry, where you ring up with a complaint and end up more confused than when you started out.

Since 2005, Optus has outsourced customer service functions to Convergys and now has roughly 4000 working abroad including India, The Philippines and Malaysia.

This trend of being in Australia (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) and calling a customer service line only to be transferred halfway across the world is nothing new.

“Had over a year of wrong billing and nearly had a breakdown. Seriously, I Luv how the signal fades in + out. Also if anyone calls me miss Donna I start to sweat lol” one Optus customer wrote on the Facebook site, which thrashes the Singapore owned giant.

And its not just limited to Optus – Vodafone also have similar offshore call centres and Telstra are shipping more customer care jobs abroad as we speak.

“I don’t want to get p**** off with them, I just don’t understand what they are saying,” one Vodafone customer I spoke to said.

Having phoned up 3 customer care previously, I spent 10 mins on the phone to my international friend and then transferred to a separate helpdesk for BlackBerry.

Neither were able to understand me, let alone the phone query, leaving this user more frazzled then before.

It doesnt matter who answers the call, but if custoemr support reps cannot understand your native tongue, not to mind a technical query, it seems the whole purpose of customer “care” disappears.

But Optus in-store staff appear not to be much better. One annoyed Optus user wrote: “3 hours & counting on phone as they upgraded the wrong phone on my business account. Still won’t listen & still can’t sort it out!! And Optus Yes stores are hopeless “we’re not Optus, we’re just a franchise!” Anyone know a real [non-franchise] Optus store/shop/office in Melbourne??”