Telkom liaison is awful

Nazmeera Moola’s article “Where there’s a will . . .” refers ( Economic Viewpoint January 8-14). It is simplistic at best and disingenuous at worst for Moola to declare, from a single positive experience, that Telkom has been transformed into “a fairly efficient, customer-friendly organisation that is doing its best to overcome the shortcomings of its outdated network”.

It also reveals a strangely South African pattern of thought: that we have no expectation that our quasi-government, parastatal companies are functional, and when they actually function in the way they are supposed to, we fall over backwards in stunned gratitude.

Telkom’s customer liaison has never been worse — the more automation it pushes into the customer-facing call centre, the worse the experience.

My own experience in trying to get a telephone line repaired for my elderly mother could not have been more different from Moola’s.

Calls that are cut while one is holding; transferred calls that forward to no-one; escalations that are not escalated; calls cut while one is in conversation with a consultant; and the powerlessness of anyone at the call centre to do anything but woodenly record your query and forward it to the next department, which does the same.

Telkom is far from functional in its customer liaison — it is about a million miles from true accountability to its clients.

So what’s next? An article about the efficiency of Eskom, because a journalist had uninterrupted electricity at home last night? Kate Nathan, Johannesburg