In the news this week is the decision by Telstra to drop the $2.20 fee charged to customers for making a payment on their bills over the counter, such as at a Telstra Shop or Australia Post. Smart move by Telstra, but it’s far too little and far too late.

Telstra drops $2.20 pay-in-person fee

Telstra CEO David Thodey today announced the company would drop the $2.20 administration fee – introduced in July – for bill payments made over-the-counter.

Thodey said the change would be implemented “over the next few months” and that Telstra would automatically refund all of the bill payment administration fees paid by customers since it was first introduced

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Apart from greedy executives and shareholders, I really don’t think that anyone will disagree with me when I say it’s wrong to be charged any type of fee for trying to pay your bill. This includes a paper invoice charge, a credit card surcharge or any form of fee for selecting a method of paying your bill. Interestingly enough, if you paid your bill over the counter with a credit card, you incurred both the $2.20 fee AND the credit card surcharge. Can anyone say greedy fucking cunts?

Several years ago I had a merchant account set up with the Commonwealth Bank for the purpose of taking credit card payments (at the time I was in high demand as a man-whore. That’s right, I sucked dick for money. $2,000, I’m that good. And you should see me fuck. Best piece of ass in three states). But seriously, at the time I was putting through the system somewhere between 3 and 5 transactions a week. Which was completely fuck-all in the grand scheme of things. At the time I was paying a .79% surcharge on credit card transactions, and something like 1.2% for debit cards. Given that the average transaction was around $30 that meant I was paying about 23 cents to the bank to process the transaction.

Given that Telstra charge 1.1% on Visa and Mastercard payment transactions I’m going to go ahead and say they’re probably making a decent profit on this. If the bank could hit me for .79% on 5 transactions a week, I seriously doubt that the bank is charging Telstra 1% of the transaction, especially considering the sheer volume that they would be putting through the system on a daily basis. A lot of those transactions are probably automated anyway, with no human interaction required if the end customer has set up a monthly automatic payment. I also take exception to being charged GST on the surcharge amount – bringing the total to 1.1%. Fuck those cunts.

Paper bills are something that I’m in two minds about. On the one hand, I can kinda see the point. There’s a fuckload of paper wasted each month sending out a bill to thousands upon thousands of customers. 98% of those customers are just going to look at the front and pay the amount shown. I seriously doubt that anyone is going to look through the records to ensure that everything is just fucking peachy. We’re in the era of cap plans and unlimited plans – it’s possible to make hundreds of calls, send a fuckload of SMS’s and use data sessions like there’s no tomorrow – and I for one don’t need to know or care about each individual entry against my account. Unless something was seriously fucked up, like this for example.

But on the flip side I do object to having to pay so I can find out how much I have to pay. Going back over the last 6 months of Vodafone bills it seems that the average bill has been 20 pages long, with double sided printing comes out at 10 pages. Now, I’m going to guess that Vodafone outsource their bill printing to a specialist company who probably print out bills and other shit on a mass fucking basis, so these figures will probably be slightly over-inflated: A standard ream of paper costs about $5. So we’ll say 1 cent per page there. An envelope maybe 5 cents, and that’s probably being generous. Postage is probably discounted, but we’ll put it at 55 cents. Printing costs are a bit harder to determine, but it’s likely that big fuckoff machines designed for this express purpose are being used, so I’m just going to go with a nice figure of 15 cents to cover the ink, toner or unicorn blood that is used. All up that gives us a sum total of 85 cents. As I said, the actual cost is probably going to be a bit lower than that. Yet Vodafone still find it necessary to charge $2.20 in order to provide a printed bill?

Greedy fucking cunts.

I’d also like to know how they factor in people who don’t have the facilities to receive an electronic bill. Not everyone has internet access or has the capacity to use it. Then we have the elderly and disabled who might just have a phone for emergency use. Or do they come under the arbitrary $2.20 fee?

Admittedly I switched to paperless billing a long time ago with Vodafone. Two reasons behind this: My files were rapidly filling up with bills that I had no reason to look at again, and I’d personally prefer a PDF copy that Gmail archives on my behalf and I can access any time I need to in the future – should I need to. I can’t actually think of any real reason to require a paper version of a bill anymore. If you need to provide evidence to support some form of reimbursment, a PDF file of the bill does the same job. If you’re going to be audited by the ATO, same deal. If part of a bill DOES need to be on paper for whatever reason, then only the necessary pages need be printed.

In fact, I wish more utility companies would offer the option of an emailed bill. Last week I emailed Origin Energy to find out they offered such a thing. The response? “No, we don’t sorry”. For a company which is constantly shoving down my fucking throat the fact they are so concerned about the environment, it’s pretty funny they can’t be offering such a thing.

If you ask me, companies like Telstra are going about the whole electronic thing the wrong way. Customers should be rewarded for choosing to self-serve themselves, receive electronic bills or performing some task that doesn’t require employee interaction. Such an example would be offering a small discount for choosing a paperless bill, or offering increased benefits ($50 more calls for example) for taking up that option.

Given that I’m presently being charged a monthly fee of $29 by Telstra just for the simple fucking priveledge of having a telephone line installed and active, I really don’t think these cunts are in any position to start jumping up and down complaining about profits and balance sheets and all that crap. This is a line which is installed purely so I can have ADSL and never makes or receives a single phone call. Ever.

Telstra also offer an online portal where it’s possible to view your account as a whole – summaries of bills, add new lines, add or remove value added services and so forth. Most of these things are performed automatically and require either very little or no interaction with someone at Telstra either during or after the fact. In fact in the last five years I’ve only had to call Telstra twice – once because I wanted to update credit card details and the online portal wouldn’t accept the new one (this turned out to be a Telstra fuckup) and one other time to fix a small billing error – again, their fuckup.

The good thing is that VOIP is going to seriously hurt Telstra and the other telecommunication companies if it isn’t already. This is good as it may actually force the greedy pricks to start offering competitive pricing, but on the other hand it may simply see them increase their already exorbitant prices and rates to compensate for lost revenue.

I will give Telstra and the new CEO David Thodey full credit for admitting that the $2.20 fee was a mistake, and further credit (pun intended) for crediting back that fee in full to customers who paid it. Good form on that one. It’s pretty clear that Thodey realises that former CEO Sol Trujillo fucked up everything he touched, and he’s working hard to change the public perception. Problem here being that hating Telstra is pretty much a national sport and I really believe the opportunity to change the public opinion is long gone.

Once the move to the new Corporate HQ is complete we’ll be running solely on VOIP and Naked DSL. Of course, to take up the naked option it means we’ll be paying Telstra a fee to install and connect the line, and then another fee to disconnect it. But on the upside, it does mean never having to deal with those fucking cunts ever again. And that makes it all worth it.

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