The downside of big business

[Dave A]

Every Telkomsa ISP client couldn't access the internet for a fair chunk of this morning. Can you imagine trying to cope with that volume of calls?

In truth they didn't cope. I got booted out of the queuing system at least three times before it let me hold on for the twenty or so minutes to get "help" with my connection problem. Well, not so much help as an explanation.

Still - can you imagine a significant percentage of your client base trying to contact you at about the same time and you're an operation the size of Telkom?

[daveob]

MWeb ADSL clients had the same problem this morning. Just got an e-mail from MWeb Operations explaining the problem and apologised for the slow call centre which was over loaded.

[Dave A]

Adding my screwy problem with Vodacom last night, it really looks like something significant has been tweaked and gone *broken*

[sandras]

We've been struggling with out Telkom ADSL line for the past two evenings, sometime after eight the line goes dead and doesn't work again while we're still up. It does however work fine again the next morning. Calls to Telkom keeps you busy for 45 minutes before you even get to talk to a consultant, only to receive a reference number and an (empty) promise to phone you back the next day to arrange for a technician to come out.

So I've got a question - if you run Telkom, do you have customer service plan? I mean, is there someone (or someones) that set up a plan and say - at minimum if there is a problem somewhere with our service, and we get queries we have to get back to the people who phoned in within 24 hours, even if it's just a heads up that we're still working on it?

And a second question - is it realistic for us as consumers to expect a certain level of service from them - under any circumstances - or should we just accept that they don't have give attention to out problems when we have them?

And third question - If I can promise my clients a 24 hour turnover on queries - even if it is just a follow up to say I am still working on it, and I'm only me handling all work and queries - why can't a big company like Telkom make the same promise?