‘WE WERE LEFT IN THE DARK’
are unhappy about the Immigration Department’s customer service during its computer system breakdown at the Urban Transformation Centre (UTC) at Pudu Sentral, Kuala Lumpur, on Saturday.
They criticised the lack of information by Immigration staff.
Tan Ting Yi, 26, who arrived at the office at 8am, said there was no announcement about the breakdown.
“There was a long queue in front of the office when I arrived.
“The main problem was that they didn’t make any announcement. A notice of the system outage was placed on the counter, but not at the office entrance.
“The officers were speaking to those only at the counters. There was no way those at the back of the line could hear them.
“Those who arrived later would join the queue without knowing that there was a problem.”
Tan, who wanted to renew his passport, said it was only around 9am that the Immigration officers opened the doors to allow the public to sit while waiting for the computer issue to be resolved.
He said there were about 100 people at the office and this forced latecomers to continue lining up outside the office.
“I was frustrated with the lack of communication by the officers, so I left about noon. Many others left around 11am.”
Tan said he went back to the office yesterday as he was planning to travel abroad next month.
C. Kumar, 40, urged the department to train its staff to communicate better with the public, especially when problems occurred.
“We are their customers. We have the right to know what issues they are facing.”
Kumar said the department should provide extra counters on weekends as the number of people going to the office increased to 480 per day compared with 200 on weekdays.
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The Immigration office’s computer system was fixed around 2pm, five hours after the system crashed.
A spokesman said the queue numbers for customers were issued only after the system was back to normal.
He said the officers did not issue queue numbers during the glitch as they could not predict how long the problem would last.
“We regret that the incident happened and we did our best to resolve the issue.
“We hope the public understands that we could not issued queue numbers while experiencing the computer outage.
“However, we opened our doors to welcome those who were willing to wait at the office.”
He said a notice was put up in the morning to inform the public about the problem.
The spokesman said other Immigration offices in the Klang Valley experienced the same issue on Saturday.