When a billing project goes bad

STRESS caused by problems plaguing Australian phone company Telstra’s customer service and billing system is forcing the telco’s retail employees and even some dealers into new lines of work. The Australian newspaper reports that the Siebel-based customer and billing software platform at the heart of Telstra’s technology transformation has reportedly blown its budget by more than $1 billion, and caused problems for staff who have to deal with frequent software crashes and error provisioning.

One licensee driven to their wits’ end by the Siebel system’s problems has been trying to sell their dealership since the start of this year. “I am in the process of selling the business because I can’t take much more of Telstra and Siebel is definitely a contributing factor,” the licensee said. “I’m not the only dealer in this position.”

The system has taken on additional complexity since mid-June when Telstra instructed employees to activate all prepaid accounts through Siebel. Previously it handled only post-paid accounts.  “Because of the headaches of Siebel every day, I decided to find another job,” said one Telstra retail employee who handed in their resignation papers last week and spoke to The Australian on condition of anonymity. Support for the troubled system is handled offshore by Telstra’s outsourced call centres in The Philippines, but dealing with the call centre staff has been another pain point for employees.

“Due to the pathetic customer service in The Philippines, the constant error provisioning of customer orders, constant billing problems, I decided it wasn’t worth the headache every day, trying to make excuses for irate customers,” the former employee said. “I just ran out of energy dealing with that every day. The worst part is, Telstra just doesn’t care.” The former employee also said the frequent errors encountered in Siebel were costing dealers to lose revenue.

This entry was posted on 30. June 2009 at 04:20 and is filed under projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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