Telecoms operators fail miserably at email support
The End-user and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations were published in the Government Gazette on 24 July 2009, and officially kicked in last week. These regulations require all telecoms licensees to designate and publicize a point of entry for complaints from their subscribers.
MyBroadband contacted all the major telecoms players to find out where consumers can lodge complaints. Vodacom, Cell C and iBurst indicated that consumers can use either their telephonic support channel or electronic means – email or their website – to lodge a complaint.
MTN, Telkom and Neotel did not bother to give feedback about where consumers can lodge complaints, and these companies also did not clearly publicize a point of entry for complaints from their subscribers. It is however assumed that their standard support and complaints procedure holds which includes electronic communications channels.
MyBroadband contacted all these companies on 10 September between 13:00 and 14:00 by using either their publicized email address or their online web form.
An automated message from Vodacom promised that a “contact centre consultant will respond to your query within 12 hours – 24 hours”, and this was the last we heard from most of these companies. Apart from Neotel – which responded 4 days after the initial email was sent – not a single company gave any feedback to the email complaint.
This gives a strong indication that while local telecoms providers publish a support email address on their website, this support channel can at best be considered completely dysfunctional. What is also surprising is that all the companies had the same poor email support levels.
Poor email support – comments and views
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