Broadband providers in South Africa: service levels compared

HelloPeter is only really used for complaints anyway so there's no real point.

/btw on the second table there are two compliment columns.
 
This should be published in the national newspapers - just for kicks of course! Nothing like bad publicity to put pressure on these bloodsuckers!
 
Rosaudio said:
HelloPeter is only really used for complaints anyway so there's no real point.

/btw on the second table there are two compliment columns.
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Who really cares if its used for complaints only and the results are not exactly representative - we guys who've been subjected to their mediocre to poor service, oligopolistic and hypercapilistic attitude for all these years know that the results would probably be the same if this was a balanced representative investigation!! They use bull**** skewed results/claims in many of their adverts/marketing exercises - we should use stuff like this in our fight for better telecommunication and internet services in this country!
 
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I do like the HelloPeter statistics, but I think it simply is incorrect to divide by number of subscribers. I will give my reasons:

1) MTN & Vodacom were early entrants and they have a large stable subscriber base. The fact of the matter is that the longer you have your contract the less issues you will have with it because it got sorted a long time ago.
2) Conversely - if a network is rapidly growing it has a lot more administration work meaning that their complaints are higher. This does not reflect that service are worse - it simply means that change introduces a gap for issue to arise. No change, means stable systems, means little problems.
3) There is a bias in users using HelloPeter and subscriber numbers on specific cell networks. HelloPeter users are in higher LSM groups.
4) The number of subscribers figure is NOT independent but given by the companies themselves. Because they try to target specific ARPU or number of subscribers they report on their numbers differently. Subscribers are counted in different ways.
5) Company Contract accounts introduces another bias. Traditionally Vodacom & MTN have more corporate accounts, and issues for those subscribers does not go through HelloPeter.

One quick way to check this is the fact the the complaints/complements ratio is totally out of whack for CellC. Looking at the complaints/1000 subscribers will give the indication that they are the worst, but compliments/1000 give them right up there? Does not compute. Please remove the per subscriber statistics until a valid method of calculation can be found.
 
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Johand said:
5) Company Contract accounts introduces another bias.
...
Does not compute. Please remove the per subscriber statistics until a valid method of calculation can be found.
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Quite. That is really the silliest "analysis" I have seen. You have to get rid of all the cell-routers, the sim-farms and such like, which is probably impossible. Besides, add up the numbers and you have something a bit bigger than the population of the country, including babies. Smacks of "let's make Vodacom look good". Bleh.
 
This is such a flawed and retarded topic.

If i'm completely satisfied with the service of a company, I am highly unlikely to go onto Hello Peter and post about it.
If I'm unset about the service of a company, then I will gladly go post about it.

I don't see how hellopeter can be used as a benchmark for service and such. For starters, I bet a good 70% of the bitching posts on hellopeter are from idiots who just moan about anything and everything. You know those people who pay R19 for a service and suddenly expect to be treated the same as a person paying R50k for a service.
 
Hello Peter is hardly a "premier" site. You would think they could afford to hire a decent designer and web developer to do their site properly. It's one of the worst looking sites in SA. It looks like the owners son did it for a high school project.
 
Johand said:
I do like the HelloPeter statistics, but I think it simply is incorrect to divide by number of subscribers[/b]
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Ha ha .. well of course MyBB is little more than a marketing arm of vodacom these days so of course they have to find ways to get voda to look better!
 
Murmaider said:
This is such a flawed and retarded topic.
If i'm completely satisfied with the service of a company, I am highly unlikely to go onto Hello Peter and post about it.
...
I don't see how hellopeter can be used as a benchmark for service and such.
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You don't see it because you haven't thought clearly through about what is being done with these stats. See, the way the "ratio" is used, it DOESN'T MATTER if people are relatively unlikely to compliment a company (they do compliment companies, by the way), as long as they're more or less equivalently likely to do so for different companies (which seems probably). Using the ratios thus normalizes out the relative likelihood ENTIRELY, producing a value that is meaningful when benchmarked against other companies. Same for the complaints, it completely doesn't matter if it's full of people who like to complain, since there is no reason to assume that people "like to complain" are particularly unevenly distributed across different companies ... the "ratio" normalizes this behaviour out virtually entirely. Please try understand it first. It also requires benchmarking against 'like industries'.

Normalizing against the size of the subscriber base is a bit flawed, and the reasons have been clearly pointed out by Johand --- but that is something MyBB did, not HelloPeter.

The only flaw with taking the average ratios is if a company happens to offer very different products and has very different service for those products. For example if you search SA Home Loans you see a lot of compliments for the home loans division, but a lot of complaints about the home insurance division, which tells you something is probably off.
 
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Whats the fuss? HelloPeter.com has been around for a long time and seems to be the most popular of websites for online complaints and compliments in SA. What does their website design have to do with anything? I would definitely take their stats as a measure on the trend of customer complaints/compliments with the companies in SA.
 
Tick said:
as long as they're more or less equivalently likely to do so for different companies (which seems probably).
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That’s my whole point, there isn't the equivalent on both sides.
When things are going well, people don't want to run around telling everyone how good something is, but when something is going wrong people want to moan to absolutely everybody that will listen to them. Yes there are a "few" people who post good things, but it's definitely not equivalent. Besides this, you can't use a hard statistics based on the assumption of equivalent.

Then you get the people, who just don't care to post at all, like me, I'm unhappy with Iburst's speeds, yet I don't have a choice but to use them considering there is no telkom lines on our complex and no 3G/HSDPA signal from any of the providers.
I am extremely happy with other companies I deal with, but I don't go post on hello peter about it, I prefer to email their managers or execs of the company to tell them that I'm pleased.

Making an article around the assumption of flawed statistics is just retarded.

You might as well make an article about how 63% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
 
Niren_M said:
Whats the fuss? HelloPeter.com has been around for a long time and seems to be the most popular of websites for online complaints and compliments in SA. What does their website design have to do with anything? I would definitely take their stats as a measure on the trend of customer complaints/compliments with the companies in SA.
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Do you know that compliments which are older than I think 6 or 12 months get deleted?
 
Murmaider said:
Do you know that compliments which are older than I think 6 or 12 months get deleted?
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No, but hows is that going to affect the stats? In fact purging after 6 months gives an up-to-date indication of the most current trends.
 
Hey guys :)

Yeah these results aren't very accurate and don't really show anything. The reason why I am saying this is the following: people that experience good service rarely feel the need to give feedback, but people who are unsatisfied just love to complain.

So to get accurate results a proper poll with a controlled amount of participants should be held... You know, so that each person has to give positive or negative feedback.
 
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