Telstra asks us "why?" - it's a good question

Telstra asks us ‘why?’ – it’s a good question

Telstra is on the campaign trail, spruiking its long overdue move to bring customer services back to Australian shores.

The company has graced the airwaves with a slick new ad filled with shiny images of small business folk, the outback, and happily collaborative faces. Telstra, a company that has actively pursued an offshoring strategy that has deskilled Australia over many years, is at pains to make sure we know they’re working right alongside every one of us. The guys and girls manning the phones are our neighbours. If our business floods, their feet are getting wet too.

The campaign even implies you’ll find Telstra call centres in towns like Gunnedah or Bourke (you won’t). And because we’re rubbing shoulders with them daily, this new breed of local call centre worker will understand our every need – from the financial struggle that demands a payment extension, to challenges getting a 5G signal behind the stables.

The rationale, delivered in silky marketing speak: “Australia is why”.

‘Why’ is certainly the right question

Interesting that Telstra’s insourcing campaign ends with a ‘why?’. Cynical though you might call me, I find its why to be a serious stretch in this bold, warm, and fuzzy shift from overseas call centres to a new, local incarnation.

A cursory examination of Telstra’s history and self-inflicted challenges suggests a far more accurate – indeed pithier – tagline for these beautifully wrought commercials: “The ombudsman is why.” “An inability to innovate is why.”

Back in the day, Telstra was as Aussie as Vegemite, Neighbours, and sunburn. As its previous iteration, Telecom Australia, people accessed its services through local offices, which later evolved into stores in and around shopping centres during its rebrand to Telstra.

If you couldn’t get into a Telstra store, it was easy to call one of its call centres peppered around the country. Being a pre-script universe, staff would ably assist you within moments of you making the call, with actual knowledge housed in their grey matter.

Fast forward to the early-2010s. With pressure to lower prices to counter increasingly aggressive tier-one competitors and resellers alike – while maintaining profits – Telstra begins funnelling its call centre work offshore. Local reps who knew their stuff gave way to ill-trained, underpaid overseas operators with no experience of the technology or culture they were supporting. From memory, Telstra didn’t spend megabucks advertising this change of direction.

Clinging to simple scripts to solve complex problems and operating in a revolving door environment, Telstra’s service reputation was shredded. 

Previously a large employer of school and university leavers taking their first career steps, Telstra was now closing the door on thousands of opportunities for young Australians. Insult was added to injury in a slew of slashes to jobs the company had retained in Australia.

It didn’t stop there either – Telstra began testing AI chatbots designed to field enquiries in lieu of humans. Contact numbers on Telstra’s website were replaced with chat links. An already mediocre customer service experience became an appalling one.

This slow-burning reputational unravelling came to a head in 2020. COVID arrived, crippling swathes of crucial call-centre resources across Telstra’s operations in India and the Philippines. The company begged as call queues swelled to four hours or longer. Chat services simply timed out. At Australia’s oldest telco, it seemed like nobody was home. Telstra’s unenviable net promoter score (NPS) dropped even further.

Then in January last year, Telstra announced it would move its call centres back to Australia. A step in the right direction for its customers, granted. But no doubt much more about image restoration, long-standing pressure from the ACMA and TIO, and struggling financial performance – salvaged only by mobiles and Optus is hot on its heels there – than an intrinsic belief in accessible, high-quality service or doing the right thing.

Why we need a reminder

It should give Australian consumers pause for thought that Telstra needs to spend so much of its circa quarter of a billion-dollar advertising budget reminding (convincing) us that it is indeed Australian.

This embodies the reality that the brand has strayed so far from its Australian roots that it spends so much building an incorrect ‘we’re for you’ narrative. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just open a few more local call centres?

Clearly in Telstra’s mind, it is not, indicating that marketing is sadly more important – and most likely cheaper – than actually changing the truth behind the claim.