Bereaved brother's bill complaint

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Since our story about a one cent bill, we've been inundated with complaints from other Telstra customers, including one man who's been receiving bills for his dead brother.

Today Tonight tried to speak to someone in person at the Telstra HQ in Sydney, but when asked for the head of customer complaints, the receptionist wasn't sure who to call.

Telstra battles one cent bill

We tried to get a response out of the telco over the hundreds of complaints that we received, but that too was a mission.

Heath Crawford has been waiting too, but for much longer. His brother Bradley passed away in January from a seizure, and two days after that, he rang Telstra to cancel his Bradley's mobile phone account.

"The recorded phone conversation consisted of telling them who I was and my relationship with Brad. That meant to be able to cancel the phone bill it took some time. The phone call was over an hour and I thought that would be enough," Heath said.

But, it wasn't.

The next month another bill arrived and it had gone up by $100.

After phoning Telstra again and being transferred between departments, they told him to drive an hour to a Telstra shop to sort it out in person.

"I went to the Telstra shop and faxed off the death certificate and the form they sent me, I would have thought that would have been the end of it, but it's not," Heath said.

Month, after month, after month, another bill, another $100.

Heath says no calls have been made on the mobile phone since Brad died.

"I kept on for a day or so just in case anyone tried to call Brad, and it's been switched off ever since, so it's never been used," Heath explained.

"Originally we had a bill for $140 dollars which we were happy to pay, but since trying to cancel it it's gone up $100 per month," he added.

Not only is it upsetting for the Crawford family, it's making their grief more unbearable and five months later, the bills are still arriving.

Right around the country, Telstra customers are calling in to complain.

Clive Manson said, "I cancelled it about 15 months ago and I've been getting a credit on my bill for 10 cents ever since on a monthly basis."

Clive Manson wants it to stop.

"For a billing mistake like this, it costs me 25c to ring them up. My main concern with Telstra is these are the people that said they were going to throw out a national broadband right throughout Australia and they can't even run a billing system," Clive said.

Another customer, Swany Forsberg explained, "I was receiving one bill saying that I owed them 55 cents and another bill saying that they owed me $1.33. I rang the customer service people and tried to get the two bills to cancel out each other."

But Swany says Telstra found that too complicated. "They insisted on the payment of the 55 cents, which I eventually paid. I'm still getting the $1.33 credit bill every month, 12 months on, it just seems ludicrous," she said.

Ian McLeod closed his account with Telstra six years ago, they are now sending letters saying they owe him 62 cents.

"When I called Telstra, I was transferred to at least half a dozen people, I said Telstra could have the money."

Apparently that wasn't clear because 7 months later Ian is still receiving a letter every four weeks.

"As a Telstra shareholder myself, it's disappointing that they're wasting time and money sending these accounts out," he added.

In the past year almost 270,000 customers have complained about poor service by Telcos, more than double the amount from the year before.

The complaints in order of volume include:

Incorrect advice 37%
Failure to act 27%
Unable to contact 17%
Lengthy wait times 13%
Rude or refusal to deal with customer 6%

Even as we tried to get a response from Telstra, we were going around in circles.

After three days of calls, unanswered emails and half an hour waiting in Telstra's head office, the only department sent to speak to us has been building maintenance.

Now we understand what the customers have been complaining about.

The Consumers Telecommunications Network's Teresa Corbin said, "These are simple complaints, it's easy to resolve in the first instance and in most situations the customer will forgive a billing mistake. What they won't forgive is bad customer service."

"The problem is that companies aren't investing in infrastructure. When finding a problem they're not resolving it and ultimately things end up being systemic across massive number of customers rather than one. They need to treat complaints like gold,as intelligence to improve their service." Ms Corbin said.

Telstra customers all have one very clear message.

"Just get your act together, it's a service, you make a lot of money, just fix it up," Heath said.

Telstra still won't speak on camera about these complaints.

But its new media advisor, David Luff, instead sent through a statement saying:

"We sincerely apologise to customers who may have experienced any difficulties with their Telstra account. We are changing the way we bill and interact with our customers."

They have promised to personally call everyone who wrote in to complain to us, so we'll forward your concerns on and we hope they do get their act together.