Well iiNET are very proactive after you call them. So much so after you call help desk, they send you an email that goes  like this.

Thank you for your call this morning,

Skye spoke to you this morning at ##:## AM WST regarding your enquiry. We
understand that you may be midway through this transaction at present;
however to enable us to improve and provide specific guidance and feedback
to Skye, we would like you to fill out a very short survey. 

To complete the survey, please click on the following link:

[insert link here] 

If you do not wish to participate in any more of these surveys,
you can unsubscribe by modifying your mail settings on the iiNet
toolbox available at https://toolbox.iinet.net.au

Normally, I wouldn’t bother with a reply. But given that I had spent almost enough time on the phone to watch most of an average B-grade movie,  there was plenty to talk about. So I provided them with this reply in their little survey. This went in the ‘free text’ field of their response.

It took approx 65 minutes to answer the phone. [operator name] was lovely and I have absolutely no complaints about her demeanour or level of diligence; she was truly the only hope you guys would have in organising a dance number in a Bollywood movie, let alone fornication in a brothel. Hats off to her.

What I do wish to complain about in no uncertain terms is that when I’ve clearly identified myself as a broadband customer using the IVR, I’m forced to listen to the same dial up customer announcements on rotation for 65 minutes. Why would I be interested in a dial up accelerator when I am clearly a broadband customer? Unlike the location of most of your call centres, the quality of your customer service has seriously gone south in the 18 odd months I’ve been using your service. Can I suggest convergence into other industries where you could promote bacon on a Kosher butcher’s IVR, beef to Hindus perhaps? It’s equally futile and about as annoying.

Furthermore, please inform me where to send the invoice for my time waisted to iiNet. Otherwise if you did want to make amends for the truly below par customer experience, please follow these directions:

1. Print this message off, preferably on A3 paper or larger
2. Make a bull’s eye like target in the centre of the paper. Make it fairly large
3. Go to the bathroom and make yourself comfortable over the target.
4. Stimulate your tummy until the target you drew earlier is covered with your fresh stool sample. If you’re having trouble, simply call 13 22 58
5. starting from the outside in, roll up the printed email into a neat bag
6. proceed to your manager’s office
7. get your manager to hold the bag at just below shoulder height
8. punch it

Tell your manager if he wants to know who the message is from, unwrap the bag and tell him I send my regards.

The above nine steps should go some way in providing some sort of empathy for the futility of your customer service that as a former customer, I had been repeatedly subjected to. Although I will be recommending your services to my de facto mother in law. Frankly, you two deserve each other. Hopefully you will both null each other out, and the world will yet again be free of persistent, nagging annoyances.

P.S. 65 minutes is a really long time to spend on the phone. I like ending letters in moot points.

On average, you’d be lucky to spend only 20 minutes on the phone waiting for iiNet - for sales or tech support enquiries.
It does also highlight the fact that why do companies ask questions in their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, e.g. ‘press 1 for voice, press 2 for data services’ if they don’t inform staff what you’ve entered.

It’s good to know that not only are iiNet completely under resourced, they’re being incredibly useless with their processes as well. Given that I was calling to cancel the service, you’d think they’d at least know I was a broadband customer and tell me some compelling reason to stay with them. Oh no, you just keep hearing the same ‘ask us about the dial-up accelerator’ announcement 50 times. With all the time and resources they put into their post call survey, why not make the IVR service more intelligent? Or put the money into more staff!?

Anyways, rant dies here. Interestingly, when I joined iiNet at least 18 months ago, the service was phenomenal. But given that help desk makes up so much of what you pay for with DSL, it’s not even worth mentioning whether the broadband was good or not.  As it turns out it was like when Shannon Doherty in the movie Mall Rats describes her ex-lovers appendage as a ‘decent size’. That’s about the nicest thing you can say really.