Bad service empire

“SORRY, we’re offline today,” the young man cheerfully told me as I entered the service center of the country’s largest telecommunications company inside a Quezon City mall.

I explained that I was there to disconnect my landline, as it was the last remnant of a business empire built on bad service. I didn’t put it that way, of course — but this is what I thought.

For more than two years, I was a subscriber of the company’s broadband service, which came with a landline. Just a few months back, I was at the same “service” center to cancel my subscription to the broadband service because it was simply too unreliable. The last straw was a six-day service blackout while they were trying to fix a “network problem.” They finally did fix it — then the network went down again the very next day.

At this point, I had had it. At the “service” center, I was told that I had to pay a pre-termination fee as the plan in which I enrolled had a 36-month lockin period, and I was six months shy of the three-year target. I did some quick math in my head: If I wait until the lock-in period is over, I would be shelling out P18,000 for unreliable service that I didn’t want. If I pre-terminated my subscription, at a cost of three months of service, I would be out P9,000.

I chose the lower cost option, but when I tried to pay with cash or a credit card, the woman at the service counter explained that they no longer had cashiers and that I would have to make payments digitally through the machine out front. I was flabbergasted. What kind of business doesn’t take cash? Or credit cards?

Ironically, I finally paid with GCash, which is owned by the company’s biggest competitor. With the assurances of the woman at the service center that my bill was all settled, I left feeling unburdened.

Then the text notices kept popping up on my phone, nagging me to pay my bill, which was clearly more than the cost of the landline.

After about a week of this, I thought I would settle this once and for all and have them pull out the landline, too, so I went back to the service center in the hopes of doing this.

Until the young man said they were offline.

I said, “What? You’re the country’s biggest telecommunications company, and you’re offline?! Can I leave a letter saying I want my phone disconnected?”

He shook his head. “Sorry sir, they’re still fixing the network problem, and we can’t call up your records, and we can’t act on your request without first seeing those records.”

“When are you going to be back online? Can I wait?”

“Sorry sir, we don’t know when that will be.”

“Can you give me a phone number I can call, so I can call ahead and find out if you’re online before driving again to this mall?”

“Sorry, sir. We don’t have a number you can call. You can try booking an appointment through our website,” he said, hopefully. So, in frustration and disgust, I left. Our largest telecommunications provider needs to protect itself from its own customers with a ridiculously unreasonable three-year lock-in period, its billing section doesn’t know when its customers have left it, and its service center doesn’t even have a backup system to serve customers if they suddenly go offline.

If we expect our country to play a major role in the digital economy, boy, are we in trouble.