Hello, is anybody listening?
Telkom’s latest anti-consumer tactic is a sophisticated form of push-back.
By making people with Telkom- related problems fight their way through the inequities of its various useless departments, Telkom transfers the onus for problem-solving onto its customers.
Most of the six problems I had in a recent six-week period were eventually fixed by a Telkom technician who reset a connection at the exchange. This is entirely anecdotal evidence, I admit, but it has an eerily familiar ring to it.
Apart from threatening me with having to pay call-out fees for technicians (when the problem was at the exchange), other anti-customer tactics have included just plain lying (“someone stole a cable”), sheer incompetence (a problem with my installation, despite my ADSL line having being operational for three years) and a sleight-of-hand we can label “we tried to call but you were unavailable” (and we don’t leave messages that might prove that we actually called you).
Solving one’s Telkom problems is a bit like calling a joke line staffed by the people who used to work for Monty Python and waiting for the next lame-arsed excuse about why your phone line or broadband connection has gone down. All this while President Thabo Mbeki has told the world, through the Financial Times no less, that Telkom is “profiteering”, and the chief executive left in what looks like a putsch.
Acting chief executive Ruben September is a fine technologist, has a keen mind that has earned the admiration of analysts and the media. He overcame the inequities of apartheid to study engineering and is a genuinely nice guy to boot. He couldn’t find himself in the hot seat at a worse time. But can he do something about it?
There is a good reason for Telkom being called Hellkom by its detractors. Try dealing with its call centre — as I was forced to, again, last week, when I had yet another ADSL problem — and you’ll understand why the president, after decrying the high cost of telecoms in his state-of-the-nation speech (again!), has to resort to complaining in one of the world’s most respected financial publications.
It takes nothing less than a 30-minute wait for the ADSL fault- reporting line to be answered, though admittedly this is sometimes at weekends. This is simply unacceptable for a telephone company.
I have wasted 40 minutes three times calling to log my complaint, then had to call back 24 or 48 hours later to find out what progress had been made. None. Obviously.
When I called to say the much- televised Closer bundle cost me as much as before I took it, and when my bandwidth spiked by 5Gb over a weekend, I was told a variety of falsehoods and was essentially told it was my fault — only to have Telkom refund me R3600-ish for clip-on fraud.
In the recent past, Telkom was incompetent, expensive and entirely lacking in customer service, but for the most part my ADSL was stable. I convinced potential broadband users to opt for ADSL because, in spite of the unmitigated pain of dealing with Telkom’s inept call centre operators and the equally painful process of actually getting the line installed, it was the most reliable option.
No longer. Now Telkom is just an expensive, incompetent and customer-angering company that even the president accuses of profiteering. Telkom is not answerable to anyone, not even Mbeki, who, by virtue of the government’s majority shareholding, is the single most important shareholder.
The saddest part is that these are not my unique problems. They are the same problems Hellkom users have been having for the past five years or more. The same lack of customer service, the same disinterest and lack of regard from the call centre, the same technical glitches, the same inane excuses .
Telkom’s profit increases as its labour force decreases and its customer service plummets.
If only MTN would buy Telkom, as the market rumours keep suggesting, it may become a decent company.
Are you listening, Ruben?
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