Telstra, I love your speeds and coverage but not so much your sneakiness

TELSTRA, I’m disappointed. You are innovating in the industry perhaps more than any other telco in the world, yet you’re still playing silly games with customers.

As a customer of yours for over four years, I recently changed providers. To whom? That’s not the point.

It’s not that you’re not doing good things to try to give better value to your customers, because you are. Your value within plans is considerably better than what it was when I first signed up. In fact, your iPhone 6s plans are only marginally more expensive than Optus and Vodafone’s, but with the benefit of a superior network. You are clearly trying to add value for customers, so why the games?

When mobile data first became a big thing on phones, you were the first to add automatic text messages that told customers when they had hit certain limits of their data. Importantly, you also added how long was left in the month so we could easily work out if we needed to buy an extra data pack or turn our data off.

But all of a sudden, you no longer send us that date.

When customers complain on social media about it, your social media team just tells us they will try to find out why it happened — and no answer is ever given. Now, I’m not trying to say you’re aiming to rip us customers off, but it’s easy to see who this benefits, and it isn’t the customer.

But maybe I’m being too harsh with you. This is a recent break-up after all, and certain negative feelings can overpower all the other great memories we shared.

Perhaps I should reminisce with your addition of automatic extra data in May this year. It certainly was a welcome addition, because your extra data charges could make someone cry if they got caught out.

Admittedly, Vodafone and Optus both had this feature for little while longer. I would always defend you, so I was more than ecstatic to see the feature added. But then I got caught out again by your sneakiness, as did many others. You see, I could see myself about to go over my usage, so in order to avoid bill shock I activated the extra data feature, but little did I know, that wouldn’t cover any of the data I had already used. Optus and Vodafone both cover this, why can’t you?

For years I would defend you to my friends and colleagues who told me the grass was greener with another telco. I would tell them about how much better your network iWhy s, how fast your data speeds were and all the genuinely great technology you were investing in. I would say that paying that little bit extra was all worth it.

But while I was willing to pay a little bit more for your service, I wasn’t willing to put up with your unneeded games. Neither should your other customers.

For the record, I asked Telstra why they removed the date from their data alert texts and at the time of writing, didn’t receive a response. Exes, am I righ