TRANSCRIPT
Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Bruce Billson interview with Leon Delaney.
Radio 2CC Canberra
10 November 2023
Leon Delaney
Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Bruce Billson, good afternoon.
Bruce Billson
Leon, fab to be with you and the Capital listeners of 2CC.
Leon Delaney
Obviously, Optus has not only dropped the ball here, they've dropped the ball badly and then having dropped the ball badly they failed to pick it up, because they weren't telling anybody anything for hours on end. And now yesterday at the end of the day, around 5:30 in the afternoon, they finally said, well, look, we'll give you 200 gigabytes of data. That's no help to small businesses, is it?
Bruce Billson
We think that's inadequate. The telcos generally, and Optus included, talk a really good game about understanding the vitality of good telco services for small family businesses. It's not just about making and receiving phone calls, Leon. Payment platforms are enabled, bookings arrangements, your ability to run your own business is often into interwoven into your telecommunication service. You've got digital data record keeping, the accounts, payroll, all these sorts of things. So, it's really much more than just being out of contact. It's out of capability to function as a business.
And what we were hoping for from Optus was that they would recognise that and come forward with a more tailored response for small and family businesses for whom many have suffered quite an important economic loss that needs to be part of the remediation solution.
Leon Delaney
It appears very much as if the CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, doesn't really understand the impact on small business.
She was talking in a television interview and responded to a suggestion that a barber had to close his store for the day in Sydney. And she said on Channel Nine, I'm disappointed that a barber couldn't do haircuts today, that seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity. The point is he couldn't take payments.
Bruce Billson
Well, he couldn't take payments and he couldn't take bookings. I mean, the barber shop that looks after my diminishing hair, you book online and he's more of a creative sort to make something out of not much with my hair.
But their whole ability to engage customers is through a digital platform. So, there's an inability to actually let customers know that you're open, let them know that there is a capability to cut hair, make the booking and then receive payment, not to mention the business of running the business of a barber shop is so dependent on those technological links. So, I don't think that was the finest moment of the CEO. I do respect that the CEO's probably under enormous pressure right now, but I guess that's my point. In the sales pitch there’s a great appreciation of those dependencies as the telcos, including Optus, talk about how they get that, they understand that and they're here to provide the services.
When something doesn't go right, I guess I'm calling for the same degree of appreciation and understanding and that would see Optus open to the fact that some businesses have had red ink in their day because of the inability to use the service that they were supposed to get.
Now, if Optus isn't prepared to do that, Leon, your small and family business listeners should reach out to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. That's a scheme that Optus is a member of. It's designed to deal with these sorts of complaints and where there is a financial loss, to raise those and to determine what is a reasonable remedy given that there's been a material loss which a business has been able to evidence, and the telco should do something about that.
Leon Delaney
That same barber shop also reported another problem, and that was that customers would come in and he would explain that he couldn't take a card payment and they would say, look, I'll go and find an ATM and I'll come back. They never came back because they couldn't find an ATM. And there's a report today that people are now taking aim at our big banks and complaining about the reduction in ATM services that we've experienced in recent years. They've been quietly shutting ATM locations and outsourcing it to third party operators.
Bruce Billson
Yeah, and in some cases not outsourcing them to anybody. I know in some regions they've lost about a third of their ATMs. They’ve also had a substantial reduction in the number of bank branches. And in some cases, the big banks say they're a branch, but they're not actually because they don't hold cash on site with no one there you can get services from.
This is this is part of the cashless economy conversation that's going on at the moment. That's fine when everything's functioning well. It goes back to that centrality of having functioning telecommunications, because you can't use all of those payment platforms, all of those ways of settling your accounts if the telcos aren’t operating. And Leon and your listeners would know over those horrible, horrible weeks of the bushfires and the like, similar thing happened where the telecommunications network was down. We're all urging businesses to digitise their operations to store data in the cloud and they're basically saying, well, how can we do all that when the pipeline between all that data and capability in our business is not functioning, the whole show comes to a grinding halt.
Leon Delaney
I have a T-shirt. It's got a great caption on it. It says this: there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer. And the fact is, when that computer stops working, we're all stuffed, aren't we?
Bruce Billson
Well, we are. And I've got a t shirt that says, I live in Murrumbateman. There seems to be no clouds out there because it never rains. There's two t-shirts. But that's the issue that people are talking about, what the work arounds look like, what the contingencies look like.
I know when my wife and I were owning a retail business and the very circumstances that we talked about arose, you used to have something called a bank card slip. You know, that little piece of paper that you’d chuck into that clunky machine and try not to get your fingers caught in and you'd fill it out by hand and then shoot that off to the bank and you'd get payment, you'd hope, some stage down the track. Now that sort of manual work around is not evident these days, and that's what makes reliable and dependable telco services important and also some accountability when they don't function as they’ve been promised.
Leon Delaney
I know you got to rush off, but just a final question. What should Optus do to compensate small business owners and operators because they've suffered a real financial loss. Optus is going to have to pay some sort of financial compensation, aren't they?
Bruce Billson
That's right. And they should honour the scheme that they've signed up to through the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, where small and family businesses can bring forward evidence of the actual financial impact. And then the Ombudsman will set what's a reasonable figure as a remedy for those circumstances.
So, if your listeners are in that situation, Leon, that haven't got satisfaction directly through Optus, jump on the tio.com.auwebsite. You'll see there's a tab there for lodging a complaint. Have your information, have your records, even have readily available what that day’s trade looked like 12 months ago and say well this is what it looks like today, here’s the customer loss that we've suffered. This is my economic harm. How about you think about addressing that as a remedy rather than just giving me more data.
Leon Delaney
They'll be inundated with so many people trying to log onto that website, they'll probably crash it.
Bruce Billson
Well, I talked to the Ombudsman earlier today, just to see how they were going, and Cynthia's very able, but she's anticipating some very busy weeks and months ahead.
Leon Delaney
Bruce, thanks so much for your time today.
Bruce Billson
Thank you, Leon.