After finally reaching the end of the week, it’s time to set up our new phones if you’ve joined us in buying a new Pixel or Pixel XL this week. If you’re a Telstra customer, you might even be able to take advantage of the Pixel range’s support for VoLTE (or Voice over LTE), which offers high quality voice calls and near instant call setup times. In other words, it’s something rather cool.
If it works.
We’ve tried this on both the Pixel XL in our office, and the Pixel, and while VoLTE works just fine on the Pixel XL, on the Pixel, it’s a different story. We’ve had some experience getting VoLTE working, and unfortunately Telstra’s customer service / technical support staff don’t have a great deal of experience in the area. Some are knowledgeable and able to get things working, and others seemingly know a bit less.
Fundamentally, from a customer perspective, there really shouldn’t be a need to call Telstra just to get this feature working; it should work without requiring interaction, or at worst, without taking more than five minutes to run through a few steps to get it fixed.
Imagine our surprise, then, to find that it took over an hour on Telstra’s Live Chat this evening to try and get VoLTE working on our Pixel, only to end up with the service agent transferring us to his supervisor … who promptly said “just go into a store”.
When it was pointed out that — after an hour on the line — this was a pretty poor approach, with no ifs, buts, questions or comments, the supervisor just killed the chat.
It’s all well and good if things don’t work as they should; mobile networks just are that way sometimes. However, something that makes it significantly worse is when your staff give up and just hang up because fixing the problem apparently is too hard.
We’ve approached Telstra for comment on what’s going on with VoLTE on Pixel, and with their customer service approach as well.
Have you got VoLTE working on Telstra? Have you had an equally poor customer experience? Are you happy with Google’s choice of Telstra as exclusive carrier partner?
