MTN best, Telkom and Virgin Mobile worst

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

Full Profile

E-mail

The 2008 results of the Ask Afrika Orange Index survey were announced recently, rating companies according to ‘service excellence’.   The survey gives a percentage score to each company gives an indication of the service levels which customers can expect from the company.

This year the survey also incorporated detailed measures of service drivers, value chain performance and loyalty.

According to this survey, the service offered by local telecoms players is worse than the service offered in other industries.

Out of the 65 companies surveyed MTN was the best performing telecoms provider with an average score of 67.24 – placing the company tenth overall.

Cell C, with a score of 65.48, was placed twentieth overall and was the second best telecoms provider. Vodacom scored 63.00 and was the third best service provider in the telecoms market.

Telkom and Virgin Mobile, with scores of 42.76 and 40.27 were placed second last and last overall, giving an indication of poor service levels provided to their customers.

MTN tops amongst telecoms providers

MTN SA has come out tops for customer service in the cellular telecommunications sector, something which MTN says is related to their substantial investment in this area.

“At MTN, we place the customer at the centre of all our business activities. All our staff understand the importance of retaining our valuable customers in this highly competitive environment. We cannot afford to compromise ourselves by offering a sub-standard service,” says Tim Lowry, MD of MTN SA.

According to Lowry the fact that MTN has invested substantially in customer-facing areas and has positioned the customer experience as an integrated feature in the overall company value proposition, has largely contributed to MTN’s first place in the cellular telecommucations sector of the 2008 Ask Afrika Orange IndexTM survey.

Other sector winners

The winners per sector were as follows: Woolworths in Food Retail, Miladys in Clothing Retail, Santam in Short Term Insurance, Romans in Fast Food, Medihelp in Medical Aid, Old Mutual in Long Term Insurance, Audi in Automotive, Nedbank in Banking, Shell in Petrochemical, MTN in Cellular Telecommunications, British Airways in Airlines and Multichoice in the Other Telecommunications category.

Customer service discussion