E-tolls good cop, bad cop

Jamie Surkont, CEO of e-toll operator Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) has vowed to treat his customers better – but only those who want to engage with him and his team.

If you tell them to take a hike and slam the phone down, you should however expect to be profiled by ETC and to be by-passed when friendly reminders are being sent of outstanding e-tolls. If that is how you want to play it, ETC will stick strictly to the legislated process. If you don’t pay you will be prosecuted. Finish en klaar.

Surkont says ETC has realised that many of its customers who have landed in the dreaded “Violations Processing Centre” (VPC) are actually quite willing to pay. They want to be compliant and ETC will help them to do what is necessary. They might have been on holiday or paid a bit late. “Life got in the way,” he says understandingly.

The e-toll system has been designed to treat a customer in either the Transaction Clearing House (TCH) or the VPC and the training approach was the same, says Surkont.

The TCH is the normal e-toll account where transactions within the seven day grace period are being recorded. Once the seven days are over without payment being made, the transaction is transferred to another account in the VPC and costs start to escalate. It may escalate to almost six times the amount charged for the same transaction in the TCH.

Surkont says registered users who landed in the VPC should be treated differently from those who elected to be in violation – the take-a-hike bunch. They shouldn’t get the same correspondence and the approach should be softer.

This requires a new culture from ETC, he says. “The engineering culture is the system works like this and that’s the way it is. Our culture isn’t (like that). We need to make sure we treat our customer correctly and it is all about our customer’s experience. The last thing I want to do is treat this (registered) customer in the same way I would the VPC profiled customer, and risk upsetting him, because he actually took the time to interact with us.”

ETC has therefore changed the processes and will contact registered users with outstanding amounts in the VPC to make them aware of the outstanding amounts and the need to take action. This interaction will still be mostly system driven, but these customers will be spared the hated SMS’s and letters about being handed over for collection.

To add to the complexity the user’s TCH account is not linked to a VPC account for the same user. Once a transaction has to be transferred to the VPC an account is created per vehicle and further correspondence has to be addressed to the registered owner of that vehicle as captured in the eNatis database. Correspondence has to be sent to the owner’s address in eNatis.

That means that a parent who registered his student child’s vehicle on his e-toll account will not be notified if transactions relating to that vehicle land in the VPC. The collection efforts will be directed at the child if the vehicle is registered in the child’s name – whether he is a student with no income or not.

Surkont says ETC has now begun to create a link between the TCH and VPC accounts for collection purposes, but the operator is bound by the legally prescribed process.

He won’t provide statistics about the number of people in the VPC, but says it is more than those in the TCH. “Some live in the VPC.” As part of their resistance against e-tolls some road users have only VPC accounts. They pay them regularly, but chose to stay there. “They are compliant VPC customers. It is bizarre. I would never have expected it!” says Surkont.

The operator is as accommodating as possible, but at some point a road user shows through the choices he makes that he belongs in the VPC. There is no sense in spending further time and money to engage with him and it is demoralising for ETC staff, he says.

Soon Sanral will have to prosecute, says Surkont. As a precursor to that ETC will send out a final statement. This function is currently being tested and in fact some were recently sent by mistake.

The exact timing depends on Sanral, but it is clearly imminent, says Surkont.

Road users who don’t react to the final statements will be handed over to the department of justice for prosecution.

How many cases will be prosecuted and when he doesn’t know, but he believes that someone who has been found guilty will mend their ways and pay the e-tolls thereafter.

Source: Moneyweb

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