Own up, Telkom

Gerhard Klann, Simons Town

It sounds to me as if you had more than one good dose of top priority customer sevice, dished out to you by Telkom, “Africa’s largest fixed-line telephone group” (“A game of broken telephone with Telkom”, Off My Trolley September 7/8).

This year alone I’ve already had four disruptions to my landline, between two weeks and two and a half months at a time .

No communication, whatsoever, from Telkom in these periods, phoning their helpline leads you, as often as not, to a friendly, sometimes rather rude, but incompetent operator who comes with the usual blah blah about helping you in one or another way.

Incompetent, because she or he is not really employed to help you but to fob you off and keep you at bay.

In this respect they are quite well trained and competent, but that’s not what I’m asking for.

And then I read, “they always wanted to improve their service to the public”. What sevice? Actually, maybe they wanted to, but let me assure you, they never did. Another one, “Customer service has become our top priority”.

Oh, my goodness, whatever do the poor suckers further down the priority-line have to endure? However, thank you for caring for other people’s problems and trying to help, often exposing the attitudes of various companies towards us along the way.