I have been on hold for more than an hour because the Internet is out. It’s always like this no matter who I call. I had an issue with Sky recently and the same thing. Does anybody in this country offer decent customer service?
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Do they have an outage page you can check on your phone? I've worked at a couple of ISPs, often they're already well aware of the issues and are working to fix them.
They have a link, it goes to chorus, chorus doesn't have an outage listed in my area. After more than an hour on hold I talk to somebody who says there is an outage in my area affecting hundreds of people.
Go figure.
Realistically? Not really. If you make it too easy to call people stop using the online channels that are cheaper to provide.
However, I'd say someone like Spark may be a good option. I believe they have callbacks so you call and push whatever number and then they call you back when you get to the front of the queue. They are also better resourced to handle the calls, and I'm assuming share their call centre with the subsidiaries (skinny, bigpipe, I think there are others). Spark itself can be a bit expensive but the subsideries are cheaper and might do ok on service. I don't think any major player will have "great" service, though, and many little ones don't have a phone number at all.
Keep in mind that unless it's just you with the issue, any outage covering an area is going to cause a big spike to the call centre and queue times will increase.
The problem is that if your internet is out you aren't going to use their web site. Also their web sites are useless by and large. Even the chat feature has super long wait times. I once tried to use the chat with sky and I would wait fifteen minutes for somebody to start a chat and it would instantly crash and stop responding.
I think the assumption if you'd use you phone on mobile data to access the website if your internet is down. But yes, like you I've only had bad experiences.
Luckily our internet seems pretty stable these days. Occasional overnight brief loss of internet but I would never know if my fancy router didn't tell me.
The point is why is there an hour wait just to speak to somebody.
Like most call centres, they have busy times and quiet times. The problem is, busy times are defined by the fact that most people are calling then. If 70% of people all try to call at the same time (lunch time, when the internet has gone out, etc) then 70% of people will get long wait times.
But from what I see there is no incentive to reduce wait times even it off peak periods. If you can call and have the phone answered right away then there are many people who will do this to find out their balance or what time they are open or other easily found information. As soon as your wait time is 20 minutes then you'll see a huge drop-off in these calls and so you suddenly don't need all those staff to answer those basic calls.
If you're always seeing wait times of 20m or more, you're most likely only calling at peak times. Calling outside those times will help.
Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it - except you might not know who is affected until you've had time to investigate.
I just don't understand the mentality of a business saying "we don't want to talk to our customers".
Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it -
Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.
I just don’t understand the mentality of a business saying “we don’t want to talk to our customers”.
Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.
Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.
Realistically it's actually pretty difficult to identify exactly which individual houses are affected and them map that against customer accounts and then send an email to them all within a short time. I don't see any reason why it should be that way, though. If they had their system set up so customers were previously mapped against certain local cables, cabinets, etc then they could identify the problem spot and trigger an email to all the potentially affected people. But again, such efforts would cost money. And I'd argue that money is better spent on reducing the number of outages.
Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.
If there is not a monopoly a business that provides better customer support should win in the marketplace.
regarding the second point. They already know the addresses of all their customers right?
For emailing customers, it's not about their addresses but working out who is affected. Remember the ISPs don't run the internet lines (largely this is Chorus). This is assuming they even know what the issue is early enough to tell people. By the time they work out where the issue is it may only be 2 minutes until service is restored.
In terms if the marketplace thing, we don't actually have that much competition. Many of the medium sized companies are owned by one of the three big telcos.
Chorus has a map showing the outages and who is effected. Same for powerco.
It is my experience neither chorus nor powerco can fix any outage in less than six hours. My ISP says any outage will be fixed between 24 and 48 hours. They will not promise less than that.
If it's really a case of Chorus providing a map and they just have to run their database of customers against the Chorus data... then there is really no excuse.
Why isn't this country more upset at what this government is doing?
I am baffled that we as a nation will just stand by and watch the Trumpification of New Zealand.
I have always been convinced that NZ is a much more conservative country than the image it tries to project, a much more racist and corrupt country than it pretends to be and nothing has brought that into sharper focus than the rule of Winston Peter and David Seymour.
I saw a video from Q&A with Jack Tame, he was interviewing american right winger dickhead James Linsey and the comments were so blackpilling. It was like 90% support for James Linsey.
Yup. We are so fucked and nobody seems to realize it.
I don't know how to fight back against it because new Zealanders are so checked out of nz politics but passively absorbing American right wing politics and applying it here.
@Fizz @BalpeenHammer Given how we lept in boots and all into the market ideology in the 1980s and never resiled from it, I am not surprised that "me first" is lurking just below the surface of our collective psche.
I wonder if we should consolidate the communities into only the main NZ community since the NZ lemmy community is so small. We probably all want to see whats happening in the country and arent at the point where we are being bombarded by town specific news.
By viewing the Local feed you can see all posts across the instance, and posts are almost always posted in the main NZ or NZ Politics communities, each of which are reasonably active.
What's the outcome we would be aiming for by doing this?
The outcome is to make communities look less dead. In my view its better to have an active nz community than all the posts split between 4 communities.
I think deleting communities is a bad idea. We lose the history then, so I'm not sure what action we would take. Out of the communities that get used, I feel like they are all justified:
C/newzealand is our main community.
NZ Politics is deliberately split off because some people want to avoid politics. It also seems active enough to support being it's own community.
C/rocketlab is topic specific and of interest to those outside NZ, it has a different audience than our other communities, so at the time we held a poll and there was support for adding this as it's own community.
The others don't get used very much. People tend to use c/nz so I feel like your suggestion to keep things together is already being done because people don't tend to use the regional communities.
I'm keen to hear from others if there is support for doing something (I'm still not sure what the action would be).
I mentioned a few months ago about getting a new mattress, well we finally did it last week. Ended up getting the extra firm Ecosa mattress on sale and it's SO firm and great. Almost feels like sleeping on the floor. It's definitely helping my lower back pains and feels a lot better when I wake up in the morning.
The hunt is still on for a larger car/seven seater.
It's great you found just what you wanted!
How's my day going? Well I toasted a hot cross bun, took it out of the toaster and put it on the hot cross bun bag, and the plastic bag melted to my hot cross bun so thoroughly that I just have to throw it away. That's how my day is going 🫠
Oof. Hope you have more hot cross buns!
I cooked two more just to even it out 😅