OPTUS UPDATE: COVID-19 (CORONAVIRUS) at 24 March 2020

Optus is committed to keeping our customers connected and supporting all Australians as we face the current challenging circumstances. We are implementing a range of business measures to support our customers and community as together we navigate through significant uncertainty resulting from the evolving COVID-19 (Coronavirus) situation.

Optus chief executive officer designate Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said: “Our hearts go out to all the people, businesses and communities that are being affected. The entire Optus team is dedicated to ensuring we are here for all our customers – to keep us connected and to offer our support.”

“We understand how much everyone is relying on our critical infrastructure to stay connected to friends and family, to schools, and to work, and we are stepping up to the challenge as we know it is essential to maintain positive daily life. And we are doing so in a safe and sustainable way.”

“We are doing as much as we possibly can to ensure our network and services remain strong, despite the significant disruptions to our teams and our normal activities. I am really proud of all our teams, who are working tirelessly to keep us all connected.”

Serving Our Customers

We have service centres in three states in Australia, as well as in the Philippines, and India. We believed this diversity of locations would make us resilient to any disruptions. However, like many companies, with increasing lockdowns across the globe, we are experiencing significantly reduced capacity to answer all service calls in the manner in which we aspire.

We have mobilised our stores so they too can be available to assist customers with questions and support, and we are working to hire new people who can be trained to provide support as well. We are in discussions with other Australian companies that have been heavily affected by current events as well as existing partners to have people join us this week. We are proud to be playing our part to provide jobs at this critical time.

We’d also like to ask for your help. To help us prioritise keeping our customers connected, we ask for our customers help in how they contact us over the coming weeks:

• If you are not connected, or if you have severe service issues, suspected fraud, or urgent financial hardship, please continue to contact us.

• All other service needs can be handled through our convenient digital channels – the My Optus App, online at optus.com.au, and through the online peer support network Optus Yes Crowd.

• In the My Optus App, we have a messaging service which allows us to communicate back and forth with you as soon as we are free – the messages are always kept and this gives us a chance to prioritise requests without missing a single one! We encourage you to use messaging as a first port of call to contact us if you need us.

Supporting Customers in Need

We know customers may find themselves in difficult financial circumstances due to the effects of COVID-19, and we want to assure those customers we will do our best to provide support and help them stay connected during this time.

From today, we will be offering to our customers, including small businesses:

• Ability to put their current plan on hold should there be no current need for the service
• Waiving of late payment fees for all our customers until 30 April
• Stopping of disconnection and credit collection activities until 30 April. 

We will also be providing more support for customers eligible for the Government Coronavirus financial support. We will be providing customers seeking support with more details on Friday at https://www.optus.com.au/about/media-centre/coronavirus-support#get-in-touch

Helping Optus customers stay connected

We are providing a range of additional services and benefits for Optus customers, helping them stay connected at this time.

• Boosting mobile data allowances: We wanted to remind customers about the extra data we are providing to our mobile customers in April. We are providing all eligible mobile subscribers 20GB of free extra data which can be activated within My Optus app anytime during the month of April and valid for 30 days from activation. For our eligible Prepaid customers, we will also be offering 10GB of additional data when you recharge $40 or more during the month of April 2020. Click here for more details about these extra data offers.

• Working from home – Loop Live: For SMBs who have moved to work from home arrangements, we want to keep you connected we are offering a free trial of our most popular SMB product, Loop Live. Loop Live can be installed on business mobile phones, allowing users to video and audio conference with customers and their team, plus more. To take advantage of this trial offer, please click here. 

• Optus Sport free: Our passionate football fans already know many international football tournaments have been suspended, including the leagues we broadcast on Optus Sport. For customers who are on paid Optus Sport subscriptions, Optus will suspend Optus Sport monthly subscription fees until the end of May 2020. Customers can still access a wealth of quality football, including archives of classic matches, short-form highlights and much more.

• Making all fixed broadband plans unlimited: A small number of our older plans have data caps, we will be making these plans unlimited until 30 April 2020 (on ADSL, NBN and Cable).

Keeping you connected through our networks

As Australians move to working from home and connect with each other digitally instead of face-to-face, we are expecting unprecedented growth in traffic on our networks. We monitor our network meticulously, and we are proud that our networks are currently performing well. In addition, Optus engineers are working tirelessly to increase capacity across both our mobile and fixed networks. We will keep you updated as we continue to boost our networks, but also ask that our customers are patient if they experience any network issues or some slowness – please be assured that we are onto it and doing everything we can.

Again, you can help us. Try to be active in how you, and your family, manage your consumption of data. The My Optus App provides useful information on data consumption for the whole family.

We will also be actively using our social media handles and the My Optus App to share tips and help keep people informed, and maybe even occasionally uplifted, during this challenging time.

“I’d like to thank all our customers for their patience and understanding at this difficult time. Adversity can bring out the best of our humanity, and I know that our teams are working together with our customers so we can all get through this together,” said Ms Bayer Rosmarin.

Media Enquiries:
Contact: 02 8082 7850