Now, after years of sitting on the sidelines and seemingly learning, well, not much from Optus’ technical dramas, Telstra has on its hands the unenviable task of rebuilding trust among its millions of customers.
But how?
To unpack the entire nightmare, Mediaweek spoke to two of the best crisis communications minds in the country: SKMG co-founder Neil Shoebridge and Bec Brown, strategic advisor at Sound Story and The Comms Department, to find out what the telco did wrong – and how it can put things right.
What should Telstra have done?
Neil Shoebridge: Pretty much the opposite of what they’ve done so far.
The last big Telstra outage was years ago, but in the interim they’ve watched Optus stumble time and again. You would think Telstra had been studying those stumbles and building the lessons into an issues management plan – something every company should have, but a company as big as Telstra absolutely should have.
The way they’ve handled this and their lack of communication with customers have been extraordinary.
I get that they had to focus on restoring services, but they also had to communicate with customers.
You could argue that would have been hard because people’s phones weren’t working. But they were only working erratically – sometimes you couldn’t make calls or send or receive texts, then five minutes later you could. So there were windows when they could have sent messages to their millions of customers.
I just think it’s appalling customer communication.
Telstra has made enormous strides over the past decade in customer service – if you’re a Telstra customer, dealing with them about bills or services is a lot easier now. So yes, the customer experience has improved drastically. But then they hit a crisis, and it’s as though they were staring out the window, thinking, ‘what the f**k are we going to do? Let’s do nothing.’
Bec Brown: The response needed to be sharper, earlier.
Once Triple Zero, public transport, payments and mobile connectivity are all involved, this stops being a normal telco outage – it becomes a public-safety and trust issue.
The biggest issue was message hierarchy. The first and most repeated message should have been about safety: can people reach Triple Zero, what should they do if they can’t connect, what’s still affected, and when will the next update come?
“The early language around the outage affecting ‘some mobile calls and data’ may have been technically accurate, but it was far too soft against what people – many people, not some – were experiencing.
The other issue is that this outage runs directly counter to Telstra’s brand promise. Telstra has positioned itself around reach, reliability and connection across Australia. So the reputational issue isn’t just that the network failed – it’s that it failed in the exact territory Telstra has been claiming as its strength.”
Bec Brown
What should Telstra do next?
Neil Shoebridge: They should be messaging every customer – they’ve got our numbers and our emails – to apologise and explain, in simple language, what caused the problem, how and why it happened, and what steps they’re taking to fix it.
If they were smart, they’d be tracking anyone who’s been quoted in the media by name and contacting them directly. And it should come from the CEO.
(Ed’s note: Admittedly, the telco has always been quick to SMS when it comes to any bill discrepancies … and yet?)
Neil Shoebridge
Bec Brown: From here, Telstra needs to shift from restoring the network to restoring trust. If it is transparent, specific, accountable and human from here, it can recover.
That means continuing to show its workings: the final timeline, the Triple Zero data, the welfare-check outcomes, the root cause, the customer impact, and the changes being made to reduce the chance of this happening again.
If the communication becomes defensive, vague, overly technical, or too focused on saying the issue is resolved when customers are still experiencing problems, the reputational damage will last longer.
Telstra’s latest statement uses the right tone in parts. Saying it is ‘deeply sorry’ and acknowledging that customers rely on Telstra to do their jobs, run their businesses, stay safe, and keep in touch is much better than a generic ‘sorry for the inconvenience’.
But the apology now needs action attached to it, and it should be visibly owned at the highest level. CFO Michael Ackland has fronted the issue, which matters, but because this goes to trust in essential infrastructure, CEO Vicki Brady should also be visible in some way. She doesn’t necessarily need to physically return to Australia while on annual leave, but a direct statement, video, or interview from the CEO would help demonstrate that Telstra understands the seriousness of the moment.
The tone should be: we know this mattered; we know why people were worried and frustrated; we are sorry; we’re fixing it; and we will show you exactly what we are doing to make sure it does not happen again. And then the critical part: the subsequent actions must match.