Prepaid meter blocking fiasco
MR Athol Trollip, your efforts to improve the well-being of the metro in such a short period of time are to be admired.
However, your latest endeavour to enforce payment of rates by means of blocking the prepaid electricity meters to encourage customers to pay up has been a debacle of note. The concept of blocking meters is a great idea, but the execution has been a disaster.
Your customer care centre and debt management department have not been able to handle the tidal wave. Better still, they didn’t even put in any over time this weekend to try to resolve the backlog, even when the system crashed on Thursday and Friday. (But, of course, that was Telkom’s fault.)
You didn’t even bother to put a back-up plan in place or provide an emergency hotline number to contact should all else fail.
It’s now Monday morning (yesterday) and already the call centre can’t manage the high call volumes experienced and the prepaid meters are still blocked, even though the account balance owing is nil.
We didn’t expect an easy time when the DA took over – we know with any change in leadership it will take time. You always appear on Facebook when you shine (like at the traffic department), but when your customers experience 4-5 day delays in getting their prepaid meter unblocked, you are nowhere to be seen. You have to take the good with the bad, Mr Trollip. Good luck for the future.