An independent pizza chain in Launceston used social media to apologise to customers after their phone lines went down at two separate stores over the weekend.
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Wiseguise Pizza’s stores at Prospect and Riverside had phone outages at both stores over the weekend during peak ordering times.
Owner and manager Alex Jones said phone connection issues have been impacting his stores for more than 12 months, costing him thousands of dollars in revenue and risking wages and supplier payments.
He said the stress and anxiety of dealing with the technological issues and trying to sustain his business had been immeasurable.
“At peak periods we would be getting hundreds and hundreds of calls and on Saturday night just gone I had around 270 miss calls that came through my mobile,” he said.
“It had a flow-on effect to our other stores, and lots of credits and refunds which is a bit of a mess really.”
The stores’ phones had problems with disconnecting, hanging up, merged lines so customers are unexpectedly looped into another person’s order, and crackling noise for months.
“It’s really embarrassing on our end,” Mr Jones said.
Telstra Tasmania area general manager Michael Patterson apologised for not being able to “provide the level of service expected” to Wiseguise.
“Our local technicians, Telstra Business Centres and local licensees all endeavour to provide the best level of customer service and support that they can,” he said.
Tasmanian Small Business Council chief executive Robert Mallett said communication issues were a main driver for small business owners to close their businesses.
“Small business owners are particularly resilient and hope they can solve things themselves, they just try to get on and fix things,” Mr Mallett said.
“[But] they can feel hopeless ... watching business walk out the door.”
He said, the mental health toll of trying to sustain a business against external pressures – whether they are communications, government regulation, financial demands or simply the long hours and responsibility – is rarely considered or treated seriously.
On Sunday Launceston NBN company Launtel visited Wiseguise’ Prospect store to provide an “emergency kit” to get them back on their feet.
The issue was temporarily resolved to help the stores start taking phone and website orders again.
Launtel’s Damian Ivereigh said his company regularly attends small businesses across the north to provide emergency phone restoration services after small businesses like Wiseguise hit a wall with major corporate communication providers.
