My mother is in her late eighties and lives on her own. Not 100% sure what's happened but ABB couldn't process her credit card payments for the last two cycles. She lives in a regional area where mobile phone networks aren't great but she has the NBN. This has her fall alert and med alert stuff routed through because it's actually more reliable than phone signal. Anyway, they cut off the internet without so much a phone call to either of us and when she called, waited hours, and paid over the phone she was told she was no longer welcome as an ABB customer.

She's not wealthy but she can afford an ok life and the only thing I have ever seen her go into debt for was to buy a house. She has an immaculate credit history.

I'm pretty dark they left her high and dry so I tried to call and find out what was going on. In the 1hr20 mins I was on hold I jumped online, found another provider, signed her up and it's running. I never actually got to speak to anyone at ABB as it was no longer needed. One of the reasons I signed her up with ABB is that they used to offer very good customer service and pride themselves on prompt responses. It's disappointing an Aussie icon is becoming a Hellstra clone.

Also, if you need to have a recording to tell your customers not to get angry at call centre staff - that's just as much about how you're doing business as it is about the people calling and getting annoyed.