Westpac is an Australian bank. One of the big ones. They made $3 billion profit last year. Their CEO David Morgan has a compensation package estimated at $14 million this year. They recently hired ex-Telstra CIO Vish Padmanabhan. And yet their website has been down all day. And they kept me on hold for over 8 minutes telling me “your call is important to us”.
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As it happens, not the first time they’ve had a major outage.
I thought you said that Paypal is your bank? Why are you calling Westpac for? You been lying to people when you tell them that Paypal is your bank?
Why not buy a share and go to the ATM!
Molly
PS. Come on dude, just get off you lazy ass and visit the branch!
Isn’t it illegal to publish a phone conversation with out the other party agreeing to do it?
Molly
Oh, and I just checked my account with westpac and had no problem! Check it here http://online.westpac.com.au.
Molly
The funniest podcast I have heard for a long time. Even the wife was in stitches. Nice work, can’t wait for the next installment. In fact I have a long list of people you could ring… Cam you could start a podcast, that deals with businesses that piss people off… Nice
Serious for you mate but that was a blast! Ha
Dave, you need to get out (listen to more podcasts) more. Can I suggest “Get this”. If you thought this funny, call the hospital in advance to get the stickes ready!
Molly
Couldn’t wait to get home to listen to this. Great fun and made me laugh. Not sure he will reply now that you said you were a journalist but who knows, I hope he does.
nice work cam. I guess its a case of tall popppies for westpac. Some disgruntled tech guy out there is getting his revenge.
Those on twitter might of heard me frustrated yesterday. A similar experience was had with NAB. I cancelled a credit card months ago and then just received notice of interest incurred on outstanding debt!! After it was closed.
I verified my identity with one girl then was passed to another who would accept that verification. Later I spent 10 minutes arguing with this one when she said she’d made a note that she had told me to visit a branch. I told her she couldn’t say she had because she couldn’t verify who i was!! I asked her which it was – could she or couldn’t she verify me? She told me to visit a branch.
F#ck them.
http://online.westpac.com.au/ is still down
Cam how do businesses get away with putting people on hold for so long?! You aren’t the only one that can have a whole day ruined by incompetent businesses – it’s unbelieveable and very stressful for the customer!
As an IT person I’m really interested what are the root causes.
I’m betting it’s a chain of events. A number of set up events and one trigger event. I’ll bet that some (probably most) are management caused.
Any problem that is caused or can be fixed by an individual employee, is not a management problem. Everything else is!
Someone have been too cheap or too quick and ignore or failed to understand the consequence most likely. There is a small chance someone understood the consequence and said we can live with it.
The call centre guy asking you to spell the name of his CIO was priceless. Best laugh of the week so far. Thanks!