Given the conisderable economic losses many newsagents incurred as a result of the Telstra network outage earlier this week, it will be interesting to see if Tattersalls lodged a claim for compensation with the telco.
The Herald Sun quoted Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton on the issue of compensation resulting from the outage, noting that it was for:
For corporate customers that depend on their service level agreement with us.
Tattersalls outlets are not customers of Telstra even though we pay for the services of the telco. Tattersalls is the customer of Telstra.
Given the value of loss of sales experienced by the Tattersalls retail network, we ought to be keenly interested in the prospect of compensation for Tuesday’s Telstra network outage. It would be reasonable to expect that any compensation would be shared with Tattersalls outlets.
Our losses would include lottery product sales as well as sales lost to some customers who did not make the usual impulse purchases with lottery products.
I was surprised to discover that Telstra has not made any formal announcement about the outage given the cost to its customers.
You shouldn’t expect any compensation. When Tattersalls upgrade! our system with Telstra wireless router in 2008, we had communication errors(just like Tuesday) almost 5 times a day for more than 3 months and we lost a lot of customers. nobody listened to our claims then.
As bitterly dissapointing as it was to see the money wolk out the door during the outage we actually ended up having a very good day after the system came back up. From 3pm to 7pm we weren’t without a line in our shop so it’s impossible to say if it affected us overall.
While i’d love to think we could get compensated for it we all know it’s not going to happen so we won’t be giving it a second thought. In all honesty we’re more concerned about getting any sort of compensation from Intralot should they leave the market or continue to perform as poorly as they have. Again we all know there’ll be no compensation there either just as their won’t be with the almighty (and greedy) Tatts, but at least with the latter we know we’re going to earn a good comission every single week and for us that’s the thing that keeps our business ticking over. If we had to rely on Intralot for that we’d have gone broke 2 years ago.