GT&T is delivering less, not doing more

Dear Editor,

GT&T’s motto is: Do More

It is an aspiration that is substantively honoured in the breach. Certainly, it has delivered less in recent months in terms of billing.

The latest version defies customers’ expectations of being able to verify that individual charges are indeed correct. GT&T does even more – the name of the ‘customer’ is deleted from the bill, and he/she becomes an automated (if not robotic) account number – without reference to the variations of charges.

The message is that the customer is as nameless as GT&T’s customer service is impersonal and unidentifiable.

It becomes an irony that the ‘communications’ section of a ‘telecommunications’ service barely provides for human connection, even though the recording pretends that ‘you’ are an ‘important’ customer, but ‘you’ will have to wait for a response – for an indefinite period.

No provisions are made for the fact that a significant percentage of customers (particularly senior citizens), have to stand in interminable lines because they are not ‘online’, and there is no accommodation for the physically indisposed.

Why does one harbour the impression that there exists an official commitment to address and correct this environment of a monopoly? Why do the ‘customers’, whose payments of undisclosed charges sustain this very organisation, have to suffer its arrogance? Why is it being ignored that, in addition to being customers, we are also citizens who have legal (constitutional) rights? It could not be that corporate entities and public sector agencies are also treated as numbered accounts?

One wonders whether there is an explicit degree of accountability by GT&T to the Public Utilities Commission, and for that matter, what progress is being made by the PUC in deconstructing the monopoly framework?

Interestingly enough, there is a Ministry of Public Telecommunications, when, in fact, the service providers are private agencies with government understood to have miniscule shareholding in GT&T. That does not say that the former should not be eligible to be part of the policymaking of an entity which is yet to be transitioned.

On behalf of customers and citizens who deserve to be appropriately respected, please ‘Do More’.

Yours faithfully, E.B. John