South Africa’s big customer support decline
South African consumers are complaining about declining customer support quality in the country.
One of the major causes of this trend is making it increasingly difficult to speak to a human operator and attempting to handle most support queries with automated systems.
This is because operating call centre services in South Africa is costly and challenging. Several South African businesses have had to face their call centre staff going on strike.
To cut costs and mitigate this risk, businesses have tried to build systems that filter everything but the most exceptional or urgent queries to a human call centre operator.
For example, a bank’s fraud line would get you straight to a specialist human operator, while its general support line might be a set of menus directing you to various other resources.
Some organisations also offer text chat support. However, consumers have complained that the quality of some of the support they receive over such channels was no longer up to snuff.
For instance, FNB’s Secure Chat feature was recently criticised on social media for its decline in service quality.
“Something is terribly wrong with FNB. Your Secure Chat staff is painfully incompetent and is of no assistance to us,” one user posted
“FNB needs to go back to giving Private Clients bankers because I cannot stand their Secure Chat service suite,” a second stated.
This feature allows customers to engage with FNB’s support team through a text-based interface.
Among the problems was that the system often failed to detect when a customer had already replied to an agent.
If the customer does not respond again within five minutes, they are disconnected from the Secure Chat agent and have to restart the conversation.
In some instances, they may be placed at the back of a queue as more people have requested assistance.
Even though this may be a small programming error or glitch, it still reflects as lousy customer service.
FNB’s HelloPeter profile
FNB’s page on HelloPeter has a rating of 1.57 stars, and many comments refer to problems that customers are trying to communicate to the business but are unable to.
These range from fraudulent activity on users’ accounts to users being unable to log into their banking app.
Conveying issues through chat can also be extremely difficult for users who may struggle to get their point across in written form, especially if English is not their first language.
That is, if users can freely describe their problem.
An example of this not being the case is the Uber Eats chat support system, where users must choose from an FAQ-like list of common problems.
Numerous complaints surfaced on social media concerning delivery drivers stealing orders once they have been “delivered”.
Here is the footage , please is this how y’all operate? @UberEats https://t.co/Q5vZmE9PCU pic.twitter.com/ht2sWT7LBL
— Kwandokuhle Njoli (@KwandokuhleX) June 19, 2024
Drivers would take a photo of the food outside a client’s residence to prove they had delivered it and then take it and drive away.
What many customers found most frustrating in this case was the inability to communicate their problem to Uber effectively.
The comments on the company’s HelloPeter page reflect the issues these customers are having with stolen deliveries.
One comment on Uber Eats’ rated page notes that they never received their order, and Uber refuses to refund them, taking the side of the driver.
This is not to say that all customers deserve refunds.
However, there seems to be a trend that Uber has not acknowledged, even after a customer posted CCTV footage showing what the delivery driver did.
As in many other cases, this results in customers trying to communicate their troubles over other channels — like social media and HelloPeter — in the hope that it will reach the company concerned.
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