Is Telkom its own worst enemy?
Many people have been victims of poor customer support from Telkom. One often hears horror stories about ADSL subscribers having to wait days or even weeks for a broken service to be fixed, and the event usually involves numerous calls to helpdesk.
Telkom appears to be well aware of its poor service levels: "Our service levels are definitely not what they ought to be and have been deteriorating,” said Telkom’s managing executive for customer service, Motlatsi Nzeku. Nzeku also admitted that their call centre response times are ‘unacceptable’.
Telkom CEO Reuben September stepped in and promised improved customer service at their group annual results last month, pointing to various initiatives in their call centre and field operations.
Telkom is losing thousands of customers per month – over the last 12 months 110 000 fixed line subscribers have fled to greener pastures – and many of these may be related to poor service delivery and support.
It is a well known fact that cable theft is a big problem for the company, but poor processes and a lack of efficient support systems aggravate an already dire situation.
According to the company’s annual results the percentage of residential faults cleared within 24 hours decreased from 50% in 2007 to only 38% in 2008. The business market showed a similar downward trend moving from 66% to 50%.
Whilst these fault resolution figures are worrisome, of even more concern is the sheer volume of faults. Over the past year there were 476 faults per 1000 lines in the residential market and 575 faults per 1000 ADSL business lines. This should immediately get the warning bells ringing, signaling to Telkom management that this area of the business needs attention.
These figures may however not give the whole story and the situation made worse by a poorly structured customer support system from Telkom.
It is not uncommon to hear that faults are often reported as resolved despite the fact that a technician has not been anywhere near the exchange or premise. Whilst this is a ridiculous dilemma for Telkom to find themselves in, it is not entirely unexpected.
Telkom’s understaffed technical department is under tremendous pressure to lower fault resolution times, but they lack the necessary resources to meet these targets. Exacerbating this problem is that the auditing system appears to lack the capacity to ensure that a single fault is not logged multiple times.
The result is that yet another call has to be made to an already overloaded call centre – and another fault logged – unnecessarily clogging up a system which at the best of times struggles to cope with its load.
It will not be easy for Telkom to fix what appears to be a ‘broken’ customer support department. But fix it they must if the company wants to halt the steady decline in subscriber numbers.
Telkom is well positioned, through its de-facto monopoly on the countries copper infrastructure, to dominate the broadband market with its ADSL service. Despite the company’s ambitions in the mobile arena, its biggest advantage over other players in an increasingly competitive market may still be its existing fixed line infrastructure – something which can not easily be replicated by its competitors.
If the company can actually improve its customer support, rebuild its tarnished reputation and decrease prices to acceptable levels they will be very hard to compete against.
Then again, maybe it is easier for the Telkom executives to rather focus on selling the company one piece at a time and tossing the spoils to shareholders. Who knows, this could even be the only way to save a company dogged by poor management and a lack of vision in what has become one of the fastest moving industries around.
Telkom support – give your views
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