Telstra has paid over $11 million to roughly 67,000 after an IT error meant it failed to compensate customers within a 14-day time limit.
Telstra self-reported the matter to AMCA, and claims it always planned to pay the money back to customers, and just missed its deadline.
“We found an IT issue that meant a number of customers had not received Customer Service Guarantee payments when they should have,” a spokesperson for the telco said.
“We self-reported this to the ACMA and made the payments to customers.
“Following this, we did a deeper dive into our systems to check on CSG [Customer Service Guarantee] payments, and this identified a number of other instances when payments had not been made when they should have. We have now made these payments, and entered into the undertaking with ACMA announced today.
“We deal with millions of customer transactions weekly however this is clearly not the experience we want to be providing our customers. We are in the process of improving the system to better automate the payments.”
The aforementioned undertaking will see Telstra improve these systems, and report compliance for two years.
“Telstra knows it has had a problem with its internal systems and processes, uncovered through its T22 business strategy,” ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said.
“The company has self-reported this and other recent breaches.
“It is critical that Telstra addresses these longstanding issues in building new systems and processes and, where it is obligated to, compensates its customers for historical breaches of telco rules.”
Telstra has undertaken to rework and invest funding into an updated IT system to automate CSG payments to help ensure this does not happen again.
The telco made the Enforceable Undertaking to the ACMA to complete this work and as part of this will be appointing an independent reviewer to ensure it has been done effectively.