Robotics and online facilities ...
benefit from the new technological service;
ii) the target groups that are unlikely to have access to the facility that could provide this superfluous service.
This disposition to go rampant in providing these technological services also applies to such agencies as GTT, who now refuses to send a monthly bill, on the robotic assumption that the customer is ‘online’. The GPL is not far behind in this attitude – all resulting from a lack of any common-sensical customer service analysis.
It is with resignation that one calls the telecommunication service only to get a recorded response which advises that you to wait indefinitely for a human to attend, too often with information that is not readily helpful.
One of the pervasive issues has to do with proof of identity, fast becoming a matter that makes the customer quite vulnerable in a world of sophisticated technology. Example the hacking of 327 million registrants at Marriott hotels over the past four years.
GTT is known to ask for a credit record – to provide a reconnection, while insisting on disconnecting the customer for not paying a bill which was not received since the latter is not online. That is the nature of the robotics beast.
But the situation is compounded when the so called ‘servant’ agency asks for a utility bill as proof of residency, uncaring of the simple fact that usually there are families mostly living in one house, and in only one of whose name can a utility bill be registered. So how does the rest of the family fare – past a basic ID card (and having no need for a requested driver’s licence.)
In the milieu of confusion can be found the eloquent absence of discretion on the part of the provider’s representative. It is then one comes to appreciate the true substance of robotics.
But come full circle over seven decades and one (im) patiently experiences the monthly inability of the post office to deliver to packed lines of senior citizens, pensions with any semblance of efficiency – by employees who are patently incapable of learning from previous (monthly) experiences, and lack direction from an inaccessible local postmaster.
The Minister of Public Telecommunications is sufficiently informed to recall what used to be respected as ‘man’s humanity to man’, and should so remind those agencies within her portfolio.
Submitted on behalf of perishable pensioners.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)