This must be the last time Optus cuts off small business

Emily Carter — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:42:09 +0000

This must be the last time Optus cuts off small business Emily Carter Tue, 11/21/2023 - 14:42

21 November 2023

Originally published in The Daily Telegraph

By Bruce Billson

The new Optus leadership needs to demonstrate it truly understands the economic pain the recent outage has inflicted on some small and family businesses.

Our hardworking small and family businesses deserve respect and not to be treated in such a shabby way as they have been by Optus.

Telecommunications companies talk a big game about how their services are so important for the vitality of small business when they're trying to sign them up as customers.

So, when things go wrong, as they have with Optus, telcos should work just as hard to make amends.

Reliable and dependable telecommunications are an essential service and there must be accountability and proper compensation when it does not function as promised.

Optus's offer of extra data is inadequate. Comments by the company that the loss was only $2 a day shows it does not understand its customers. This is what Optus charges for its services, not what the loss of that service represents.

Let's be clear. Some small businesses had red ink because of the failure of this essential service.

Channel 9 reported the story of a barber unable to work and Optus's dismissive reply that you don't need telecommunications to cut hair.

Like many small businesses, the barber engages customers through a digital platform. The outage meant they couldn't take bookings or receive electronic payments. (And when customers went to look for an ATM, they couldn't find one either!) It is not just about making and receiving phone calls.

The digitally enabled world the telcos have encouraged small business to join means running your business is interwoven into the telco service. This includes digital data record-keeping, accounts, payroll and many other functions.

This is far more than just being out of contact. It left small business out of capability to function as a business.

It's encouraging to hear Optus now says it recognises the impact the outage had on small and family businesses, and is pledging a tailored response to their circumstances with a dedicated team to help.

But this is what Optus is obliged to do as a member of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman scheme, and the jury is still out on whether this new pledge is delivered satisfactorily.

It will also be interesting to see how Optus deals with the impact of the outage on small businesses that are customers of other smaller retail telcos that rely on Optus as a wholesaler of telecommunications services and infrastructure.

I urge affected businesses, if they don't receive a satisfactory response from Optus, to reach out to the TIO, which is designed to deal with complaints such as lost business profit due to network faults and to determine a reasonable remedy.

Australia's 2.5 million small businesses provide jobs for 5.1 million people and employ 42 per cent of all apprentices and trainees in training - nearly double the amount supported by a big business.

Life is hard enough for small businesses juggling cost-of-living pressure, energy costs and interest rates. They believed Optus's claims of dependable service and deserve to be treated much, much better.

TRANSCRIPT: Optus and small business, banking services

Emily Carter — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 01:42:32 +0000

TRANSCRIPT: Optus and small business, banking services Emily Carter Mon, 11/13/2023 - 12:42

10 November 2023

TRANSCRIPT

Australian �Թ�� and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Bruce Billson interview with Leon Delaney.

Radio 2CC Canberra

10 November 2023

Leon Delaney

Australian �Թ�� and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Bruce Billson, good afternoon.

Bruce Billson

Leon, fab to be with you and the Capital listeners of 2CC.

Leon Delaney

Obviously, Optus has not only dropped the ball here, they've dropped the ball badly and then having dropped the ball badly they failed to pick it up, because they weren't telling anybody anything for hours on end. And now yesterday at the end of the day, around 5:30 in the afternoon, they finally said, well, look, we'll give you 200 gigabytes of data. That's no help to small businesses, is it?

Bruce Billson

We think that's inadequate. The telcos generally, and Optus included, talk a really good game about understanding the vitality of good telco services for small family businesses. It's not just about making and receiving phone calls, Leon. Payment platforms are enabled, bookings arrangements, your ability to run your own business is often into interwoven into your telecommunication service. You've got digital data record keeping, the accounts, payroll, all these sorts of things. So, it's really much more than just being out of contact. It's out of capability to function as a business.

And what we were hoping for from Optus was that they would recognise that and come forward with a more tailored response for small and family businesses for whom many have suffered quite an important economic loss that needs to be part of the remediation solution.

Leon Delaney

It appears very much as if the CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, doesn't really understand the impact on small business.

She was talking in a television interview and responded to a suggestion that a barber had to close his store for the day in Sydney. And she said on Channel Nine, I'm disappointed that a barber couldn't do haircuts today, that seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity. The point is he couldn't take payments.

Bruce Billson

Well, he couldn't take payments and he couldn't take bookings. I mean, the barber shop that looks after my diminishing hair, you book online and he's more of a creative sort to make something out of not much with my hair.

But their whole ability to engage customers is through a digital platform. So, there's an inability to actually let customers know that you're open, let them know that there is a capability to cut hair, make the booking and then receive payment, not to mention the business of running the business of a barber shop is so dependent on those technological links. So, I don't think that was the finest moment of the CEO. I do respect that the CEO's probably under enormous pressure right now, but I guess that's my point. In the sales pitch there’s a great appreciation of those dependencies as the telcos, including Optus, talk about how they get that, they understand that and they're here to provide the services.

When something doesn't go right, I guess I'm calling for the same degree of appreciation and understanding and that would see Optus open to the fact that some businesses have had red ink in their day because of the inability to use the service that they were supposed to get.

Now, if Optus isn't prepared to do that, Leon, your small and family business listeners should reach out to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. That's a scheme that Optus is a member of. It's designed to deal with these sorts of complaints and where there is a financial loss, to raise those and to determine what is a reasonable remedy given that there's been a material loss which a business has been able to evidence, and the telco should do something about that.

Leon Delaney

That same barber shop also reported another problem, and that was that customers would come in and he would explain that he couldn't take a card payment and they would say, look, I'll go and find an ATM and I'll come back. They never came back because they couldn't find an ATM. And there's a report today that people are now taking aim at our big banks and complaining about the reduction in ATM services that we've experienced in recent years. They've been quietly shutting ATM locations and outsourcing it to third party operators.

Bruce Billson

Yeah, and in some cases not outsourcing them to anybody. I know in some regions they've lost about a third of their ATMs. They’ve also had a substantial reduction in the number of bank branches. And in some cases, the big banks say they're a branch, but they're not actually because they don't hold cash on site with no one there you can get services from.

This is this is part of the cashless economy conversation that's going on at the moment. That's fine when everything's functioning well. It goes back to that centrality of having functioning telecommunications, because you can't use all of those payment platforms, all of those ways of settling your accounts if the telcos aren’t operating. And Leon and your listeners would know over those horrible, horrible weeks of the bushfires and the like, similar thing happened where the telecommunications network was down. We're all urging businesses to digitise their operations to store data in the cloud and they're basically saying, well, how can we do all that when the pipeline between all that data and capability in our business is not functioning, the whole show comes to a grinding halt.

Leon Delaney

I have a T-shirt. It's got a great caption on it. It says this: there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer. And the fact is, when that computer stops working, we're all stuffed, aren't we?

Bruce Billson

Well, we are. And I've got a t shirt that says, I live in Murrumbateman. There seems to be no clouds out there because it never rains. There's two t-shirts. But that's the issue that people are talking about, what the work arounds look like, what the contingencies look like.

I know when my wife and I were owning a retail business and the very circumstances that we talked about arose, you used to have something called a bank card slip. You know, that little piece of paper that you’d chuck into that clunky machine and try not to get your fingers caught in and you'd fill it out by hand and then shoot that off to the bank and you'd get payment, you'd hope, some stage down the track. Now that sort of manual work around is not evident these days, and that's what makes reliable and dependable telco services important and also some accountability when they don't function as they’ve been promised.

Leon Delaney

I know you got to rush off, but just a final question. What should Optus do to compensate small business owners and operators because they've suffered a real financial loss. Optus is going to have to pay some sort of financial compensation, aren't they?

Bruce Billson

That's right. And they should honour the scheme that they've signed up to through the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, where small and family businesses can bring forward evidence of the actual financial impact. And then the Ombudsman will set what's a reasonable figure as a remedy for those circumstances.

So, if your listeners are in that situation, Leon, that haven't got satisfaction directly through Optus, jump on the tio.com.auwebsite. You'll see there's a tab there for lodging a complaint. Have your information, have your records, even have readily available what that day’s trade looked like 12 months ago and say well this is what it looks like today, here’s the customer loss that we've suffered. This is my economic harm. How about you think about addressing that as a remedy rather than just giving me more data.

Leon Delaney

They'll be inundated with so many people trying to log onto that website, they'll probably crash it.

Bruce Billson

Well, I talked to the Ombudsman earlier today, just to see how they were going, and Cynthia's very able, but she's anticipating some very busy weeks and months ahead.

Leon Delaney

Bruce, thanks so much for your time today.

Bruce Billson

Thank you, Leon.