Telstra mobile memo service suffers as TeleTech offshores operators

David M Williams
Thursday, 22 January 2009 10:11

Your IT - Home IT

Users of the Telstra mobile memo service have reported a serious drop in service quality since shortly before Christmas. Telstra has admitted its outsourced provider, Teletech, has offshored 15% of calls to the Philippines, with, it seems, no quality guarantees.

Telstra’s mobile memo service is a boon for busy executives and road warriors. It provides a human operator who will take your calls when you are unable to answer for whatever reason. The operator will send a basic message to your phone by SMS and optionally by e-mail.

This has numerous advantages over regular voicemail. For one, your phone calls are always answered by a human even if you are out of signal range.

Secondly, you can glance at your phone and read SMS messages when in meetings and be aware of what is happening without having to wait until an opportunity presents itself to dial your voicemail and listen to a message.

Arguably, the service can be more efficient. On the one hand, proponents will note they can read a message and call the sender back in a fraction of the time it would take to listen to a voicemail and respond. Conversely, detractors recognise mobile memo can only capture the most basic of details in a message – up to 160 characters only!

Also arguably, mobile memo can reduce your phone bill.

Using Telstra’s conventional voicemail service costs 6c per 30 second diversion, and 14c per 30 second retrieval. If someone leaves you a message you are stung both for the time it takes for them to leave it and the time it takes you to listen to it. If you have to replay the message a couple of times (because the first time you don’t have a pen handy and need to take a note, for instance) the costs add up.

By contrast, mobile memo has a monthly charge of up to $12 per month and a per message cost from 85c to 50c per message. If you ordinarily receive more than 50 voicemail messages in a month it is possible that mobile memo can save you money.

Yet, a sizeable number of faithful mobile memo users are in arms after a serious degradation in quality within the last month.

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