telstra shocker

I know that Telstra have always been bad with customer service, especially via phone. Things are pretty much the worst it has ever been. ..

First of all I wanted to call them about an enquiry. I went to their website to find the phone number, it was ridiculously hard to even find the phone number off their website...

I tried calling them for an enquiry about my account. The phone recognition is a disaster, 'say what you are calling us about', 'say your date of birth' 'confirming your date of birth, is this correct?' 'say this' 'say that'... WHY NOT USE THE OLD KEYPAD SERVICE... eg 'press 1 for billing'. 'type in your date of birth'...

Most of the time with voice recognition, you have no idea what to say, and what you do say, the system won't recognise what you want.

Anyway, after spending a long time (several minutes) trying to get through to an operator, I finally succeeded only to have somebody from overseas that cannot speak or understand english properly...

It took around half an hour to get my enquiry resolved when it should have taken 5-10 minutes... The problem mainly due to 'the system not working as fast as I would have liked, sorry for this' I was told from the operator...

I know this is common knowledge, and everybody knows how bad the customer service of telstra is, but seriously, does it need to be that bloody hard? I know they are trying to save money, but how long can this go on for??