Telkom client billed for 2 years after cancelling account

A reader recently contacted MyBroadband concerning their difficulty with cancelling a Telkom service – continuing the trend of Telkom customers struggling to cancel their accounts.

Customers who have received service cancellation confirmations from Telkom continue to receive invoices, according to numerous reports we have received – and their bank accounts continue to be debited on a monthly basis.

Telkom has described this problem as a system error, following the migration from an older cancellation system to a new one in April 2018.

“Our investigations show that the majority of cancellation enquiries are for cases logged prior to April 2018 and/or during the transition period to online,” Telkom said.

Many customers are struggling to cancel their accounts as a result, but this will hopefully improve once Telkom allows affected users to process their cancellations online.

Two years of debit orders

The most recent case is that of a reader who mailed MyBroadband about their trouble cancelling a Telkom account. They have been trying to get a cancellation processed for more than two years with no success.

On 3 January 2017, the Telkom customer filed for the cancellation of their entire account at a Telkom store. This included their ADSL line.

This was done by filling out a printed “Consumer Request for Contract and Service Cancellation” form at the Telkom store, and filing the request with store employees.

Despite the application being processed, a monthly fee continued to be deducted from the customer’s bank account every month via a debit order.

The customer was told they would be refunded, but they did not receive any compensation from Telkom.

Furthermore, when the customer attempted to halt the debit order with their bank they were told it needed to be cancelled within 24 hours of the stop order date.

Following this attempt, the customer did not try to halt the debit order again – out of fear of being automatically blacklisted by Telkom.

This was a serious risk, as the bank account was linked to their business.

Cancelling the account

After the customer was charged R594.15 every month for two years, and after making several unsuccessful attempts through Telkom to cancel the account and have the charges reversed, they contacted MyBroadband.

MyBroadband reached out to Telkom about the matter, after which the customer was contacted by the company’s escalations department.

The customer’s account was credited with R13,502.47 and Telkom’s support team requested the customer’s banking details to rectify the extended period of incorrect billing.

Telkom did not provide comment on questions sent to it by MyBroadband, however, in which it was asked why billing took place for two years despite the user requesting a cancellation on multiple occasions.