TIO goes overboard with sales records policy
Next time you chat to a phone or internet salesperson about the merits of a new product, don’t be surprised if they jot down notes as they speak.
According to some bright spark in the office of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), every sales staffer should be able to produce a written record of every discussion with a customer if there’s a complaint. It’s red tape on steroids.
The requirement applies courtesy of a new TIO policy that was unveiled in April. It sets out the TIO’s expectations of the evidence a service provider should produce in case of complaint.
According to the policy, the TIO reckons providers are well placed to record and store comprehensive records of the information they provide to consumers during a sales transaction, if the information provided is likely to lead to the consumer buying a product.
Apparently there’s a very simple test as to when information was likely to lead to a sale. It’s the fact that there was a sale. The retrospectoscope is such a handy tool. The policy offers no guidance at all as to where the line is drawn between a sales transaction and general enquiry and information.
Once the test is retrospectively met, the range of records the provider should produce is daunting. Complete copies of all phone recordings in the sales process. A formal, signed statement from the sales or door-to-door sales representative who spoke with the consumer, with a copy of their ID to verify their signature. The number of verbal exchanges the representative had with other consumers that day / week and / or since that day (or the average number of exchanges they would have had).
You’d almost think the industry was being set up to fail.
The fact is that most service providers keep no such sales records and the TIO knows it. Being an organisation with a broad discretion as to how it resolves consumer complaints, any policy that slants the playing field one way or the other is systemic bias. The telco and ISP industry is on notice that its present practices will lead to an increasing proportion of cases being resolved against it.
Not for a moment do we applaud poor sales tactics. This column only recently railed against the absurdity of the term ‘cap’ when applied to phone and internet plans where it means ‘minimum spend’, not ‘maximum’. Scratch the surface of many marketing campaigns and you’ll find substandard information.
Take Virgin Broadband’s new hot deal, for instance. Over two years, $39 a month gets you a wireless modem and 5 gigabytes of included traffic. Even though that includes uploads as well as downloads, it’s a nice price. But the small print on the web site explains the costs of quitting early in a very different way from the same explanation on Virgin’s paper flyers. We think they probably add up to the same thing, but the difference isn’t helpful.
Neither is the fact that the web site won’t allow users to copy and paste the small print. If you were prudent enough to want a record of what you were told, it wouldn’t be easy to make.
Virgin’s Frequently Asked Questions is clear that you can’t use any other wireless modem with the service, and that you’ll own it outright after 24 months. But it forgets to say whether the modem could be used on another service. If not, owning it outright isn’t quite the bonus it might seem.
Worst, Virgin’s mobile broadband offering isn’t really broadband in areas where Optus’ 3G/HSPA network doesn’t reach. If you want to know where that might be, both paper and web advertising refer you to a coverage page that tells you nothing more than whether your home or office address is in a covered area. Since most of us want a mobile service for precisely those times we are not at home or the office, it’s a pretty useless fact.
So three cheers to the TIO and any other regulatory white knights for keeping the techno-bastards honest. But the new record keeping policy isn’t realistic or balanced. Witness this passage: ‘[TIO takes] the view that it is not enough for a provider to give us one recording of one call, if the consumer claims there were several separate calls.’
A consumer’s claim, it seems, is gospel truth at the TIO these days.
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