MTC and customer service

Last week we gave credit to MTC for getting in front of the possible causal link between cellphones and cancer.

This week unfortunately we have to take them to task for some abysmal customer service. I was sent an email last week asking me for assistance. Sitarara has a shiny new phone and wanted a package that would suit his needs. He found the appropriate package and went to purchase it at the MTC mobile home at Wernhil. He was attended to by a customer service representative who was to install the N$400 package on his phone, but at the end of the month, to his dismay, Sitarara noticed that he was being charged double the rate, i.e. N$ 800 instead of N$400. He went back to Wernhil’s MTC to complain. In this instance he was assisted by the, now elusive, Milton. Milton informed Sitarara that he knew who had added the surcharge (an unwanted extra 500 MB of data) on his phone, acknowledged that this was an MTC error, and promised to have it fixed. This was on Monday, June 27. Milton promised to be in touch. Sitarara eventually got tired of waiting and went back again. Until today this problem had persisted. MTC, what is the problem? We all know mistakes happen and sometimes employees commit errors, we understand all of that. The real question is: Why can one not get this situation fixed? Sitarara made dozens of phone calls, incurring expenses, and went to the customer service centre multiple times, he spoke to supervisors, front line employees, managers and the PAs of managers. By the time he wrote to me he was looking for a law firm as he was so disgusted that he wanted to sue, and probably felt that this was the only way to get compensation. When I got the e-mail, I thought I would just phone MTC and get the issue resolved for him, I saw no need to write on a minor customer service issue. So I called head office and got a number for the MTC mobile home and Milton. I phoned all day of Monday, not once did anyone pick up the phone. Nobody… all day. So I phoned again Tuesday morning, again no answer. I called head office and asked for the PR department, whom you can usually assume are savvy enough to treat journalists better than they appear to treat their customers. I was told to hold the line for a transfer to the person who would resolve the issue. Instead of being transferred, I was just hung up on. I phoned back nobody picked up. I had to ask myself; should I walk there?Finally, on Wednesday morning I got to speak to a human who cares. I told Abby in MTC’s P.R department my sad story. Firstly, she apologised, which matters, the fastest way to defuse an upset customer is to take their complaint seriously. This is just what Abby did. Within an hour Sitarara informed me that Milton had called him and they were going to resolve the issue for him. Abby then called me back and let me know that customers like Sitarara who have problems can always contact Alan Krohne at MTC head office, who oversees all the mobile homes, or alternatively track down Patty Arendse who is MTC’s customer relationship manager. The problem is that the kind of customer care I received from Abby should be the norm, not the exception. One should not need to work for a newspaper to get simple issues like this resolved. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the ways some of our big companies feel about customer service, or when the competition finally comes to Namibia (no offence Leo) people will abandon them in droves.

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