South Africans are begging for help to cancel their Telkom accounts
Telkom customers across the country are expressing frustration at their inability to cancel their products through conventional channels.
MyBroadband has received an unending stream of complaints from Telkom users over the past few months regarding this problem.
Telkom customers across all packages – fibre, ADSL, and LTE – are affected by this issue as Telkom uses a unified system for all product cancellations.
Many customers have waited longer than six months for their Telkom month-to-month products to be cancelled, despite trying a number of different methods.
In many cases, Telkom continues to bill the customer for months while their cancellation is processed, which can result in serious repercussions.
Certain users who contacted MyBroadband said they had Telkom payment defaults listed on their credit records due to “nonpayment” of their account while they were attempting to cancel it.
Begging for help
The pleas for help flooding into MyBroadband’s inbox have grown increasingly frustrated, with users expressing their dismay at Telkom’s failure to process their cancellations.
A number of customers who mailed MyBroadband have been trying to cancel their package since 2017, and some have been chased by debt collectors due to nonpayment of services which they requested to be cancelled up to 12 months ago.
“I beg of you for any assistance you can offer,” one customer implored, while many others said they may need to resort to legal action against the operator if they could not cancel their product.
In their correspondence with MyBroadband, customers have labelled Telkom’s actions as extortion, not satisfied by the company’s standard response that they should file their cancellations online.
Telkom’s solution
Since these issues began surfacing, Telkom acknowledged that it was experiencing some issues with its cancellation systems.
It said it was working to fix the problems with its cancellation system, but these issues seem to remain just as prevalent as they did months ago, judging by the number of complaints received by MyBroadband.
The company advised that customers who were unable to cancel their packages should contact the national customer care channel via the following methods:
- Email – [email protected]
- Call centre – 012 311 2473
Telkom also suggested that customers follow the procedure for online cancellation outlined in this document, but many customers have had no success with this method either.
There is no dedicated channel for customers dealing with product cancellation issues, and they are resigned to calling Telkom’s customer care line to attempt to resolve their problem.
Telkom previously stated that older cases from when the company was still using an email system could be difficult to process. This caused problems in locating requests, or not receiving them at all.
Speaking at the MyBroadband 2018 Conference on 18 October 2018, Telkom CEO of small business and consumer Serame Taukobong said the company is working towards addressing issues of poor service.
Taukobong said Telkom has become associated with bad service and viewed in a negative light, and this needs to be fixed.
Whether this means Telkom will improve its service to customers who are struggling to cancel their packages remains to be seen.
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