Vodacom's website is a complete and utter mess

[Karl Muller]

Vodacom's biggest challenge is that the company has turned from a lean, mean and sleek "startup" into a corporate elephant, where plenty of red tape (both internal and from Vodafone) prohibits any sort of progressive thinking

I won't challenge the later conclusions, but I must query the description of Vodacom as a lean, mean and sleek startup. I did a temp job at Vodacom in November/December 1994, just after I quit teaching in South Africa. I worked on their customer complaints desk. It was total chaos -- to this day, I've never seen anything like it. Anyone with half a brain cell would have guessed that South Africans would fall over themselves for an alternative to Telkom service. Vodacom was hopelessly oversubscribed, and was absolutely inundated with complaints.

One irate customer told me that he would go to the consumer journalist Isobel Jones, who had a lot of clout at that time. I felt I had better report this to the supervisor. His words were: "Tell him if he wants to speak to Isobel Jones, he can join the queue." So I went back to the guy, and said: "My supervisor says, if you want to speak to Isobel Jones, you can join the queue." No one can say I was not an obedient employee.

Lean, maybe. Sleek, nyet.

But the real point I want to make here, is that the telecoms operators rely absolutely centrally on confusion and obfuscation with prices, packages and deals. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, called these deliberately tangled cartels "Confusopolies". His definition:

Confusopoly: A group of companies with similar products that intentionally confuses customers instead of competing on price.

Is there a more classic case of a confusopoly than SA telecoms? I would really hate to see it. So Vodacom's opaque website is not entirely an accident.