Telstra are defending their decision to offshore hundreds of jobs from local centers I hear. Doesn't effect me much, since I diced them after a bad call centre experience.

A lightning strike in the district had damaged my land line phone, & the computer. Fortunately the cordless still worked, but a call to Telstra, was answered by a Philippine girl. She was not technically knowledgeable enough to understand about lightning strikes & gave me a run around. After a couple of fruitless days a call to the ombudsman delivered a call from a local technician, who sent a new phone. I was sorted, but not happy.

Then Vodafone decided to take money out of my account but not apply it to my prepaid Mobil account. This time it was a string of Indian ladies who gave me absolutely no help at all. Even the fact that I could give them the number of their North Sydney account my money went into was no use.

Again the Ombudsman got me a call from a Tasmanian office, & my credit was applied.

I now have a provider of both accounts with a local call centre, & have been bombarded with offers from both above companies. The pigs will all have wings before they get any business from me.

In fact it is now my standard procedure to check if a supplier has local or overseas call centers. No local call centre, no business from me.

I think it is time all people started doing this, to get these companies to do the right thing. They may be able to justify overseas call centers legally, but if it looses them enough business, they will soon change their plans.

I agree many may not.
The call center for pay TV via satellite , now taken over, is overseas.
And unworkable.
Seems the local management,hope they got sacked, just lets the problems build up then blames the call center.

Telstra's business practices are extremely poor but I really can't fault their technical service. To get hold of the technical service is my major gripes with Telstra. If there was another provider in my area I believe 95% of subscribers would dump Telstra purely because of their condescending approach to their customers.

Yep the Telecommunications Ombudsman is the first point of call these days, and they're remarkably effective. Who would have thought a bureaucracy could do that. The very mention of them seems to do the trick most of the time, and when it doesn't and you actually lodge a complaint, the telco comes crawling on their knees quick smart.

It took some jousting but finally worked out the one and ONLY department responsible for every and ALL stuff ups in Telstra. "Telstra Work Order Management Dept" These faceless back room entities handle all paperwork and work orders for all jobs. It took 2 weeks 6 visits from 3 different technicians to do a simple job that I could have done in 20 minutes [ I used to work for them in prehistoric times ]. They then had the gaul to bill me for each visit to fix up the same problem.
Shake up THIS department and you solve 90% of all Telstra woes.

Why doesn't the Government charge the share holders a tax for every call centre employee overseas. Let these selfish creeps pay for their greed.

I expect we will be having the same discussion about overseas education centres providing the bulk of teaching for Australian students, in five to ten years time. Most courses from upper secondary school, through TAFE and university can be provided online. This will open up the market for such education to individual teachers, and whole institutions, off-shore.

If that sounds far fetched, the Queensland government has already decided to shut down the "Queensland School for Travelling Show Children" and replace it with online distance education: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/students-better-off-without-travelling-school-langbroek-20121016-27o40.html

As the teachers will no longer be collocated with the students, there is no reason why they need be in the same country, let along the same state. At present I am studying some of the implications of this at the university level: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/08/tertiary-teaching-for-research-led.html