My time at Telstra - Getting chewed out for refunding a customer.

So, for a period of about 3 years ending in 2017, I worked at Telstra as a Salesman/Customer Service representative. I was one of those guys you would see when you came into a store, selling mobile phones, internet plans, Foxtel deals, and more. I worked for a franchisee who, at the time, owned two retail stores and a business centre (a business centre being a by-appointment-only B2B sales hub).

During my time at Telstra, I didn’t fit their mold of a ‘successful’ salesman, mainly because I refused to push unnecessary products onto people just to meet sales targets. It just didn’t sit well with me.

To explain what I mean by that, here’s a breakdown of the typical sales targets:

• New Consumer Plans: These had to be brand-new mobile plans—no recontracts, no prepaid, no casual plans. The customer had to get a fresh number and commit to at least 12 months. Monthly targets ranged from 5 to 10 of these per salesperson.
• New Business Plans: More lucrative but involved extra paperwork and outdated systems. Same restrictions as consumer plans—had to be a brand-new business number. Targets were typically 2 to 7 per month.
• New Bundles: Selling a package that combined internet and home phone services to increase customer spend. The monthly quota was around 5.
• New Foxtel Subscriptions: Selling a brand-new Foxtel connection was difficult with the rise of streaming services. Monthly targets were around 2.
• Accessory Repayments: Pushing accessories like phone cases and chargers on a monthly repayment plan. These came in $120, $240, or $360 tiers over 12, 24, or 36 months. The accessories were massively marked up, a $10 screen protector would be sold for $60. The goal was to attach this to 50% of mobile contracts, including recontracts.
• StayConnected: Essentially phone insurance, priced at about $15/month, plus an extra $300+ to replace a lost or broken phone. The goal was to bundle this into 50% of mobile contracts, including recontracts.
• Mobile Broadband: Selling SIM-based internet plans for tablets and hotspots, locking customers into 12- to 36-month contracts.
• Telstra Platinum: A paid tech support service that was mostly redundant, covering issues that could usually be fixed with basic troubleshooting or manufacturer warranties. Introduced in late 2016 (and for the first year the support was based out of Adelaide, guess where it went after that), later targets pushed for this to be attached to 50% of contracts. There were two tiers: a standard tier at $15 and a Telstra Platinum Plus tier at $20.

The targets were, in my opinion, pretty ridiculous. They weren’t based on what customers actually needed, but on squeezing the most money out of them. For example, the push for accessory repayments meant customers often walked away thinking they got ‘free’ or ‘subsidised’ accessories, only to later realise they were paying them off over years at massively inflated prices. The same went for StayConnected, which was framed as an insurance benefit but ended up costing customers more than it was worth in most cases. Instead of finding the right solution for each person, the system encouraged misleading sales tactics just to hit quotas. My methodology at work and how I managed to stay around for so long, was about giving customers an actually good and memorable service, handing them my business card, and then throwing an entry in their calendar to come back and see me in a year. I aimed to be someone they could trust to not bullshit them.

A business is obviously there to make money, but seeing how often my co-workers would bullshit a customer by saying “oh these accessories are free” and then bundling the accessory repayments onto the bill was nothing short of astoundingly aggravating. Because guess what? That same customer would come in a month later after checking out their bill, and the consultant would get a benefit of the doubt decision (“oh the customer just didn’t remember what they signed for” 🙄) or the rep would tell the customer that they had to go to another store to resolve it (obvious lie).

I will say, a product of my methodology was that while I didn’t hit targets outright, I did get a nice and consistent gross profit per hour. See, the extra bonus component of targets was that you had to be earning Telstra around about $100/hr for every hour you worked there, some people could hit all those targets and barely fall short of that gross profit target. I however, with a consistent flow of referrals and return customers, consistently sat just comfortably close to that target.

Commission was also based on hitting the majority of the product targets, and fulfilling the gross profit target at minimum… Frankly, I never hit commission once!

Anyway, onto the story.

It was a quiet afternoon in 2015, just after lunch, when an older woman walked into the store. She looked to be in her (maybe mid to late) 50s, and carried herself with a kind, patient demeanor. I recall she was a nurse, and she had brought along her adopted teenage daughter. They weren’t in a rush, weren’t demanding, just looking to find a reasonable phone for the daughter.

As part of a push by franchisee management at the time, we had to conduct “check ins”, because there was obviously some metric that corpo wanted met in terms of checking customer accounts and leaving notes on them. So before anything else, I jumped onto her account to see the details of what she was paying at the moment and if there were other existing services (honestly, it was an opportunity to upsell, but given my methodology it was more an opportunity to see where they may have been ripped off and put them on better arrangements).

As I pulled up her account, it became clear that something was off. She had told me that she only used a mobile phone and her home internet was with another provider, so why was she paying $50 per month for a mobile broadband dongle? I asked if she knew about it, because looking at bill after bill, I couldn’t see any usage on it… ever.

From what I can recall it was something that she had gotten a plan for in 2005. Digging deeper we could also see delivery and device details, which had been ported over from a legacy system, which also told me that she had never received it. So over a period of 10 years, she had essentially spent $6000 for something she never got. What a rip off.

I did ask if she could recall anything about it, and as typical, she indicated she never needed one and that around that time she would have just gone into a nearby (now nonexistent) Crazy Johns store, which was a Telstra reseller.

I sat there for a moment, processing what I had just found. A decade of payments for something she never even received. It was infuriating. I explained the issue, sat there and compiled a quick notepad file with all the info I needed, recommended she go get a coffee then come back in half an hour, while I called BOH (Back of House) to get things rectified. After about 40 minutes of back-and-forth, I secured a refund, and not just a small refund, the full $6000. That money was credited straight to her account, effectively covering her bills for years to come.

The BOH rep even told me it was the biggest refund he had ever issued, what a win.

Note, if I had known what I knew now about australian consumer law, I totally would have advocated that we go the extra mile to getting this refunded to her bank account. But I wasn’t super wise to all of that back then.

When I told her, she showed off pure relief. This was money she wasn’t expecting to get back, money she had unknowingly lost. It was one of those moments where I felt like genuinely great, I was actually helping someone rather than doing a dance of selling them something (when they could have gotten it elsewhere for cheaper).

With that credit, I hooked them up with solid mid-range phones—nothing flashy, just reliable devices that actually suited their needs. I’ve always kept up with mobile tech (a regular lurker on /r/android and /r/apple), so I knew exactly what would work best for them. No pushing a top-tier iPhone on someone who wouldn’t even use half its features and would just get frustrated when the battery tanked in a year. No repayment plans, no unnecessary add-ons—just straight-up, fair pricing for phones they could buy outright.

For the mother’s plan, I set her up with a low-cost SIM-only, month-to-month deal and threw in an unlimited calling and texting pack. That was my little trick—see, a standard $35/month plan at the time only gave you 500MB of data and barely any calls or texts, which was a joke compared to prepaid options. Instead, I got her on a $20 pay-as-you-go SIM plan, which normally charged per call and text, but when I bundled in the unlimited pack, it also came with a bonus 2.5GB of data. Way better value, and she was set.

For her daughter, I went with a $30/month prepaid plan, pulling from the account credit. Simple, flexible, and no sneaky fees lurking around the corner.

By my calculations, that refund alone would keep them covered for at least six or seven years. No stress, no surprises—just a proper fix for a situation that should have never happened in the first place.

It was one of the best customer interactions I ever had. I actually had took the chance to say “You know, I believe if I do my job right, then you should never see me again haha”, and I got a bitchin’ review for it too, straight 10/10s and a nice written component.

Then, of course, I got chewed out for it.

I went to our store back of house, to invoice the transaction in the franchisees proprietary system. When my manager asked what I spent the last hour doing, I explained, I was obviously happy about it. He wasn’t though, I got told to come with him and we walked out of the store and around a corner in this shopping centre.

There I got chewed out hard.

My manager was fuming (for non-Australians, “pissed”). He went off about the lack of upsell, hammering on how I ‘missed a prime opportunity’ to throw in StayConnected, push them onto a new broadband plan (even though they were happy with their current provider), and—of course—accessories. The obsession with upselling wasn’t just about store-level pressure; it came straight from the top. They were (in my opinion) aggressive and somewhat unrealistic targets, which put pressure on franchise owners, who then leaned hard on managers, who in turn took it out on staff. It wasn’t about helping customers - it was about wringing every possible dollar out of them.

I didn’t really defend myself, because frankly, fuck em.

You better believe this came up in my monthly performance review. A co-owner of the franchise chain sat there as my manager detailed the instance and I could see the gears in turning behind their eyes, wondering how they could get rid of me.

Do I regret it? Nah, Not for a second. Because at the end of the day, that woman walked out of the store knowing someone had actually looked out for her, rather than trying to squeeze her for more money. And that? That mattered more than any commission ever could. It felt good for the soul, so to speak. I was working for a company that, let’s be real, had probably ripped off or frustrated just about everyone in Australia at some point (if it wasn’t you, it was someone you knew). And in my own small, anarchy driven way, I managed to take a little bit back from them. It wasn’t the last time this happened either.