Mature conversation.

[oRiX]

If you have any ideas to make it better, please feel free to suggest. I fully understand the dissatisfaction about poor customer service and respectfully request a mature and objective conversation to make it better.

I wake up in the morning switch on my laptop and read the news on BBC. Along the route no packet touches Telkom. How many people can claim that? That makes be fell good.

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/308503-Iburst-the-WORST

I agree that not lining the pockets of government officials while surfing the net feels good, but if their service is better then...

The main thing people want is good feedback and to feel that their business is appreciated. The grievances are constantly reiterated within these forums:

-Waiting times on call service are extremely long
This is a managerial problem, it's pretty obvious what must be done. The call centre is the face of the company. The manner in which your customer is treated there relates to that customers perceptions of the company. "i'm waiting forever. They don't care about their product as long as they get my money. How rude of the person, they bviously think my business is not worth their time..." and so on.

-Billing department is constantly messing up which means customers must deal with point 1. That is again a managerial issue and is extremely serious. If all the clients who have been tripple billed sued for reimbursement with legal fees, which I think they are entitled to, iBurst would not survive.

-Issues are not dealt with immediately. As is the case with the OP of the link, call centre agents are often inadequate and/or require documentation which then seems to pass through Vogon-like bureaucracy as it winds its way to nowhere. I'm not certain how the workload is distributed through the call centre, but it is almost as though each person works on random issues with several people looking into a single problem, instead of being a case worker where one person becomes solely responsible for the issue they are given.

-the most recent of issues, ensure proper backup planning, i know that the break in the cable outside of Egypt had nothing to do with iBurst but where other ISP's had various backups in place iBurst's single backup was down, but I'm sure this will be resolved.

-be honest, if iBurst goes down because of an iBurst fault say "oops we screwed up".

-Have a proper informative system (not twitter or facebook or MBB) whereby iBurst customers can be kept up to date. Not all of iBurst customers utilise social networks and I doubt all of them use this site.

Cater for the lowest common denominator when it comes to dealing with your customers. Email, which I’ve suggested before but was shot down because "some users would consider it as spam", but I’m not talking about "iBurst has just setup a tower in the smallest village in Africa" emails, just something to say you are aware of the issue so that people who do not use the existing forms of iBurst communication don't have to deal with the first point.

Give an approximate time of completion even if it's a thumb suck over-estimation of 18 hours, at least it will keep people quiet, while they watch their clocks. I think the thing that irritates people the most is when they sit and wait for the error that might be fixed any second and pass the time playing freecell.

The main thing is that most of these issues are managerial problems that should easily be resolved without much input from the customers.

If I’ve left anything out please feel free to add in a civilized manner.

 

[r00igev@@r]

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/308503-Iburst-the-WORST

I agree that not lining the pockets of government officials while surfing the net feels good, but if their service is better then...

The main thing people want is good feedback and to feel that their business is appreciated. The grievances are constantly reiterated within these forums:

-Waiting times on call service are extremely long
This is a managerial problem, it's pretty obvious what must be done. The call centre is the face of the company. The manner in which your customer is treated there relates to that customers perceptions of the company. "i'm waiting forever. They don't care about their product as long as they get my money. How rude of the person, they bviously think my business is not worth their time..." and so on.

-Billing department is constantly messing up which means customers must deal with point 1. That is again a managerial issue and is extremely serious. If all the clients who have been tripple billed sued for reimbursement with legal fees, which I think they are entitled to, iBurst would not survive.

-Issues are not dealt with immediately. As is the case with the OP of the link, call centre agents are often inadequate and/or require documentation which then seems to pass through Vogon-like bureaucracy as it winds its way to nowhere. I'm not certain how the workload is distributed through the call centre, but it is almost as though each person works on random issues with several people looking into a single problem, instead of being a case worker where one person becomes solely responsible for the issue they are given.

-the most recent of issues, ensure proper backup planning, i know that the break in the cable outside of Egypt had nothing to do with iBurst but where other ISP's had various backups in place iBurst's single backup was down, but I'm sure this will be resolved.

-be honest, if iBurst goes down because of an iBurst fault say "oops we screwed up".

-Have a proper informative system (not twitter or facebook or MBB) whereby iBurst customers can be kept up to date. Not all of iBurst customers utilise social networks and I doubt all of them use this site.

Cater for the lowest common denominator when it comes to dealing with your customers. Email, which I’ve suggested before but was shot down because "some users would consider it as spam", but I’m not talking about "iBurst has just setup a tower in the smallest village in Africa" emails, just something to say you are aware of the issue so that people who do not use the existing forms of iBurst communication don't have to deal with the first point.

Give an approximate time of completion even if it's a thumb suck over-estimation of 18 hours, at least it will keep people quiet, while they watch their clocks. I think the thing that irritates people the most is when they sit and wait for the error that might be fixed any second and pass the time playing freecell.

The main thing is that most of these issues are managerial problems that should easily be resolved without much input from the customers.

If I’ve left anything out please feel free to add in a civilized manner.

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback and will forward it to the executives.

For clarification, I use iBurst at home (and my wife uses it to sub for a news agency) My experience was that latency sensitive international applications were impacted but local services, email and web browsing were not.

 

[oRiX]

Ronald, i must say thanks to you, you have really stuck to it and have helped a lot of people who come through here, much respect for that man. It must be a very thankless job, but you do it well and it is appreciated a lot of the time. I hope iBurst comes right cos i really don't want to have to deal with telkom and their issues.

 

[NightShift]

Ok, so customer service is particularly important when things are going badly – but it should be of a certain standard all the time.

The fact that no packet touches Telkoms network is great, but nobody out here really cares that much about that point. We’re not all freedom fighters – we just want to be on the Internet with the rest of the world. I do not care how my packets get routed around the world generally speaking.

I do care about:
1. Reliable Service
2. Consistent levels of service
3. Being able to get the information I need when 1 & 2 are not happening

If you think about that, addressing these 3 points would keep the majority of people quite happy, and I think they constitute the basics. I will only speak about the first two points briefly, because for the most part over the last year the service has been okayish. But I can honestly compare it to other ISP’s in the world and I can tell you almost with certainty that if you competed as you do now in a more developed and competitive market, iBurst would be dead in the water – there is no question about it. In the UK, ISP’s that provide better service get killed off quite often. The fact that we are not in these markets is not an excuse not to aim to achieve world class standards in as far as you can.

Reliable service would imply that you have some kind of recovery plan in place for when things go wrong. Im not an expert in your area but as many people have mentioned iBurst seems to get affected by an outage in Egypt a lot more than other ISP’s in South Africa. These outages which seem to come along fairly regularly leave me feeling that there is one network connection from the iBurst cupboard out to the rest of the world. If you haven’t already (which you must have surely) it’s probably a good idea to work out the most efficient, automatic way, to deal with any single points of failure.

But anyhow, onto the crux of problems, as reported by just about everyone that comes to this forum. Your call center is ****. I would love to know what your abandoned call rate is – its surely higher than 10%. Even that is an artificial measure of customer service though, because what really matters is if the people at the end of the phone managed to sort out the problems. And I can tell you from personal experience that in most cases, those clowns have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. This is probably because you hire people with 0 experience, or people who have call center experience, and you pay them dirt. You probably also have a typically very high turnover. I have never spoken to anyone at the call center who knew more about technology than I did, and in such cases, its very frustrating to waste my time assuring the person that yes, I have copied and pasted my password and I’m sure that the fact that my connectivity is down is not because my password magically changed itself. Yet this person who is on the front lines, has absolutely no idea that is own house is currently not in order – actually it’s on fire, but ignorance is bliss. I have never had a good experience with the iburst front line.

Which is why I come here! That’s why a lot of us are here! We’ve somehow found one spot on the Internet where someone fairly senior in the iBurst support chain responds somewhat reliably to our problems and updates us with what is actually going on. It’s a symbiotic relationship because we on this forum are fast. When there is a problem, we are the first ones to tell you, because your front line is no doubt telling people that there really is no problem, and that they need to try copying and pasting their passwords, stopping the information from getting up to where it needs to be addressed.

Handfuls of us here on this forum can self-organise and within minutes validate which parts of the country are experiencing problems. The fact that YOU provide such better levels of service than your helpdesk means that I will never actually call those fools, and that is to your detriment unfortunately. Of the 2 or 3 major problems I have experienced over the years of using iBurst (like deactivating a service, having my account cancelled etc.) I have tried to sort out both via the helpdesk, and via the forum. You can have 1 guess as to which of those did jack, and which got me through to the person I needed to talk to to get my issues sorted out.

 

[r00igev@@r]

Ok, so customer service is particularly important when things are going badly – but it should be of a certain standard all the time.

The fact that no packet touches Telkoms network is great, but nobody out here really cares that much about that point. We’re not all freedom fighters – we just want to be on the Internet with the rest of the world. I do not care how my packets get routed around the world generally speaking.

I do care about:
1. Reliable Service
2. Consistent levels of service
3. Being able to get the information I need when 1 & 2 are not happening

If you think about that, addressing these 3 points would keep the majority of people quite happy, and I think they constitute the basics. I will only speak about the first two points briefly, because for the most part over the last year the service has been okayish. But I can honestly compare it to other ISP’s in the world and I can tell you almost with certainty that if you competed as you do now in a more developed and competitive market, iBurst would be dead in the water – there is no question about it. In the UK, ISP’s that provide better service get killed off quite often. The fact that we are not in these markets is not an excuse not to aim to achieve world class standards in as far as you can.

Reliable service would imply that you have some kind of recovery plan in place for when things go wrong. Im not an expert in your area but as many people have mentioned iBurst seems to get affected by an outage in Egypt a lot more than other ISP’s in South Africa. These outages which seem to come along fairly regularly leave me feeling that there is one network connection from the iBurst cupboard out to the rest of the world. If you haven’t already (which you must have surely) it’s probably a good idea to work out the most efficient, automatic way, to deal with any single points of failure.

But anyhow, onto the crux of problems, as reported by just about everyone that comes to this forum. Your call center is ****. I would love to know what your abandoned call rate is – its surely higher than 10%. Even that is an artificial measure of customer service though, because what really matters is if the people at the end of the phone managed to sort out the problems. And I can tell you from personal experience that in most cases, those clowns have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. This is probably because you hire people with 0 experience, or people who have call center experience, and you pay them dirt. You probably also have a typically very high turnover. I have never spoken to anyone at the call center who knew more about technology than I did, and in such cases, its very frustrating to waste my time assuring the person that yes, I have copied and pasted my password and I’m sure that the fact that my connectivity is down is not because my password magically changed itself. Yet this person who is on the front lines, has absolutely no idea that is own house is currently not in order – actually it’s on fire, but ignorance is bliss. I have never had a good experience with the iburst front line.

Which is why I come here! That’s why a lot of us are here! We’ve somehow found one spot on the Internet where someone fairly senior in the iBurst support chain responds somewhat reliably to our problems and updates us with what is actually going on. It’s a symbiotic relationship because we on this forum are fast. When there is a problem, we are the first ones to tell you, because your front line is no doubt telling people that there really is no problem, and that they need to try copying and pasting their passwords, stopping the information from getting up to where it needs to be addressed.

Handfuls of us here on this forum can self-organise and within minutes validate which parts of the country are experiencing problems. The fact that YOU provide such better levels of service than your helpdesk means that I will never actually call those fools, and that is to your detriment unfortunately. Of the 2 or 3 major problems I have experienced over the years of using iBurst (like deactivating a service, having my account cancelled etc.) I have tried to sort out both via the helpdesk, and via the forum. You can have 1 guess as to which of those did jack, and which got me through to the person I needed to talk to to get my issues sorted out.

Thanks for the extensive feedback. I'll back certain it gets into the right hands.

I really thought people were passionate about an alternative to Telkom?

 

[nevstarwader]

Well put oRIX and Markd. The time and effort you put into your comments is much appreciated by another annoyed subscriber.

I have been an Iburst subscriber since the beta days of 2004. I used to feel good about being part of this new mobile technology. I recommended many friends to become subscribers. Now I am embarrassed to subscribe to Iburst. I actively advise people NOT to go near Iburst. I used to be able to communicate with a few helpdesk techies and had access to some senior personal too who I could eventually call friends. All the good people were suddenly retrenched perhaps 18 months ago. Why? I now have NO avenue I can resort to when things go wrong. Ronald appears to be trying but who he represents I have no clue. Iburst stopped caring - at least on Hellopeter.

I have said it before - Iburst has a policy of hiding its head in the sand when things go wonky. I'd go further - they have been actively dishonest about their problems. The website occasionally has mention of an age old incident - why not keep people honestly and timeously informed? Ronald is happy not to have to technologically touch Telkom, but I have installed a number of ADSL modems for friends and have to tell you Ronald - Telkom beats the pants off Iburst in the helpdesk department. About a year ago Iburst contracted in helpdesk companies who knew zilch about Iburst's history and not much more about IT. It is pointless speaking to them.

I cannot believe how Iburst can blissfully continue thinking they are a good ISP. None of my emails touch Iburst mail servers any longer. Lost too many emails. Now Gmail reliably takes care of that. At least four people I referred to Iburst have had continuing, frustrating, ridiculous billing problems. They started billing one guy three months after he unsubscribed and having fought to sort that out, they started billing him again 2 years later! When I have connectivity issues,I temporarily switch on my Vodacom cellphone modem and have good COMMS.

Iburst needs a strong, moral, competent, caring leadership. There is none now. The lack of quality leadership is reflected all the way down the management structure. Iburst - a very sad story. My circumstances don't allow me to migrate to another ISP now, but when I can I will pull the Iburst plug and be happily rid of the incompetent Iburst arrogance.

(I tried hard hard to keep this a 'mature conversation' - I am so fed up with Iburst.)

 

[Former member 61586]

I have to agree with the comments here. I have said it before, Ron's help on here to those of us that know about him is just not sustainable. I also feel that it should be a last resort and not the first avenue of solving issues which it has become for many on here.

My strong suggestion is that people like Ron who still know the meaning of customer service be put into management positions where they can make a much bigger impact. I know Ron can probably not forward this suggestion to the executive, but I think someone should (perhaps Gcebile).

 

[oRiX]

Gcebile is still here?

 

[NightShift]

Thanks for the extensive feedback. I'll back certain it gets into the right hands.

I really thought people were passionate about an alternative to Telkom?

Perhaps you like to think of yourself and or your company as pioneering in the ISP space, or even evangelical, which leads you to have this passion. I applaud it really. I think your perspective might be too technically focussed though.

For me, I want to get online. I want to be able to search for stuff, play games reliably, and ultimately not have to try and think about what could be going wrong this time. If I dont get that, and there is no satisfactory level of customer service providing backup, then in my opinion there is no real alternative being presented.

You're probably caught between a rock and a hard place Ronald, because while you may forward this on to your upper/senior managers, the ball is in their caught to actually do something about it. I think we appreciate that were the decisions yours to be made you'd probably do what needs to be done, but typically the higher-ups might focus on their short-term profits and might not see that long-term brick wall gaining speed and getting closer by the day? I dont know. All the signs are there.