Telkom in turnaround
DEAR SIR — Itumeleng Mahabane wrote about his unfortunate experience in his attempt to have his service restored on Telkom ADSL (‘Hellkom’ woes a symptom of poor government, August 16). I offer him my personal apology, and regret that he had this frustrating encounter.
Behind the scenes, my first step as CEO in April was to complete a full diagnostic of what we all know to be uneven customer service in ADSL. Some customers report excellent service, while others find they wait too long for problem resolution. The challenges lie in reducing the number of faults, the time to fix them and the responsiveness of the call centre. We know we have to do much better, and we are tackling the task head-on to intensify our drive to improve customer service.
Telkom has introduced a turnaround programme of which service is a central focus. To this end, we are actively working to strengthen our call centre, the field force team and network quality.
From a call centre point of view, this will mean offering a better customer experience that will include improved first-call resolution as well as reduced time to reach the right customer service representative.
We are also rolling out our Next Generation Network, which will guarantee improvements in speed and quality of fixed lines with far fewer faults.
Customers benefit by enjoying more reliable broadband at higher speeds and improved service delivery due to more sophisticated network management tools. To this end, we have deployed over 145,000 active ports and fibre directly into 3,150 office blocks and business parks, thus embarking on decommissioning large copper cables that previously served these buildings.
As this network spreads, consumers will experience far fewer service disruptions and considerably improved line quality and speeds.
Already more than 200,000 superfast, high quality connections are available to consumers in certain suburbs in the large metros.
That said, we continue to maintain our legacy networks where service is vulnerable to cable theft and weather events. The levels of copper cable theft are creating significant challenges in maintaining continuous ICT service to our customers in high theft areas. The deployment of resources to cable-theftrelated breakages has a direct impact on resource availability and time to respond to other matters of repair. Copper cable theft remains a major inhibitor to Telkom’s capability to maintain and improve service levels.
It has been encouraging in the past few months to meet Telkom staff and to hear their views.
It is clear to me that most Telkom employees, probably more than anyone, recognise the need to change and do better. We are committed to transforming the service Telkom provides to become one SA can be proud of.
Sipho Maseko
CEO, Telkom