My time at Telstra - That time my manager enabled stalking.

Required preamble:

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. So if you haven’t already read the first part of this (probable) series, go check it out.

Back when I worked Telstra, the CRM (customer/client relationship manager) system was called Siebel. Which was a whitelabel software also used at other companies such as Vodafone and Optus, authored by Oracle. It ran like absolute shit, and is the sole reason I abstain from anything Oracle related to this day. Nowadays Telstra uses a version of Salesforce and has pumped millions of dollars into making it usable by the end user, talk about trading one piece of shit for another huh.

Anyway, Siebel was explained to users as heavily logged, and confidential. As is typical at any org, you couldn’t look up the details of family or friends without another staffer present, and you definitely shouldn’t be looking up random accounts without the customer present. There were audits by both Telstra and the management staff, that guy who looked up the prime ministers phone number? You best believe he got in trouble. Because the expectation was that any time you hit the account you should be leaving notes of your interraction with the customer, no notes = missed opportunity and that’s what Telstra were really scouting for, it apparently hurt scores/targets (that part is kinda debatable).

Now, onto the juice.

But like, what happens when the person doing the viewing of accounts is the person who does the reporting? Cue this story.

I think it was around the end of 2016, I was doing my usual thing (not really giving a shit about sales targets and just trying to be the best person I could be, get the job done, go home, play with my dog; This job really wasn’t doing anything for me), when a lowly man walks into the store and asks for my manager. Uh oh, had someone done something wrong? I ask his name and then go to the back of house area to fetch the man, informing him who the visitor was. My manager gets up, walks up to this guy and they go to one of the consoles in the middle of the store.

It was an empty day so I idled around and did some cleaning, I look over and see my manager and the guy talking, mang is on the PC and going through records, I think nothing of it. About 10 minutes pass and they’re printing off bills, specifically the phone call records (who you called was appended to the final pages of a bill), bit of an odd practice to be honest since you can look that up on your account.

To be honest, this whole interraction would just get weirder. See, my manager would just be standing there, with his back to the customer and the screen the whole time. I could see the guy was a bit agitated, and my manager was just standing there, again maintaining his back to the guy and the PC, not saying anything. After a while, the guy leaves with his printed records, and the PC is locked. I don’t ask any questions, but I do know something is up.

My manager returns to the back of house area. Now is my opportunity to play private investigator.

I wait a minute, grab my cleaning equipment, go to the aisle and start working on each of the machines, making my way to the middle console. I unlock the PC (shared logins, the password was literally [4digitstorecode+4digityear], like abcd2016), pop open the link to Siebel, which fun fact ran on fucking Internet Explorer, log in and then check the browser history. See, while each user had their own login, the browser history wasn’t wiped on closure which means it was shared across all users, so I travelled back to a few minutes and took a look at the profile.

Account owner: Woman.

Okay, that’s fine, you can only have one account owner, so I look at the notes. The most recent one read something like “Checking customer account for cold sales opportunity”, not verbatim but you get what I mean. Anyway, that was a fucking lie. Quick, go check the authorized users.

No one else on the account, just the woman. The guy who came in? WAS on the account at one point as a billing contact, but had been removed. Eurgh. I don’t need to look at the bills, it’s evident what was going on. My manager, who probably knew this dude well enough to do this for him, was helping him stalk his ex (girlfriend, wife?). Gross. Phone records to see if she was cheating maybe? Or maybe see if she had moved on? Maybe they’re in the middle of legal proceedings? I don’t know, but it was definitely not a “cold sales opportunity”.

Close the browser, lock the PC, go back to cleaning. I didn’t say anything to anyone, not my battle to fight. But I did make a mental note to not trust my manager, wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted to hang around with.

Time passes, the guy comes in again, same thing, asks for my manager, they go to the console, they print records, I do my cleaning thing, I check the history, same shit, different day. Disgusting. For a “top tier” network operator, the fact there was no form of multi factor authentication or verification was shitty.

I did eventually get the story out of my manager (coming around to my house with a 6 pack of canadian club, smashing them all, and then allowing anyone to do an AMA is a real dumb move mate), and it’s what you can expect with the “justified” spin of “yeah he’s been hard done and she’s being a cunt and all that and I want to help my mate out”.

Telstra fucking sucked, It wasn’t much longer until I was out of there.