Our shop phone was disconnected on 2nd March. Upon calling, we were told it was because there was an outstanding account. Upon quoting the receipt for the last full payment on 19th February, showing a zero balance, the reason for non-service was changed to a line fault. A fault reference number was supplied by SMS. On Thursday 5th March another SMS was received advising that the fault had been resolved, but still no phone service. The phone started working on 9th March, but no ADSL. This took a further 10 days to come back, and many many calls to 10210. They could it seems not get their head around that it was an existing ADSL service needing restoration as opposed to a new service, despite the ADSL having been in place for 4 years
My home line became very noisy on 14th April and was reported. An SMS arrived on Friday (2 days later) giving a reference number. On Monday another SMS was received saying the fault had been resolved yet the noise and very slow ADSL is still present. On reporting it again, I was told that a new fault report would be generated, since as far as they were concerned, the previous fault had been cleared. On hearing this, I called my contact Simon at Telkom and asked him to pull some strings
Simon tells me that the technical division are judged on their performance on how long it takes to resolve faults and more often than not, will mark a fault as clear when nothing at all has been done to fix it, assuming that sometimes, the fault will disappear by itself. So this is the "trick"... Improve your performance score by marking faults resolved after 2 days and when the customer complains again, treat it as a brand new fault
My home line became very noisy on 14th April and was reported. An SMS arrived on Friday (2 days later) giving a reference number. On Monday another SMS was received saying the fault had been resolved yet the noise and very slow ADSL is still present. On reporting it again, I was told that a new fault report would be generated, since as far as they were concerned, the previous fault had been cleared. On hearing this, I called my contact Simon at Telkom and asked him to pull some strings
Simon tells me that the technical division are judged on their performance on how long it takes to resolve faults and more often than not, will mark a fault as clear when nothing at all has been done to fix it, assuming that sometimes, the fault will disappear by itself. So this is the "trick"... Improve your performance score by marking faults resolved after 2 days and when the customer complains again, treat it as a brand new fault
