Poor Service from Eskom

It is with regret that I have to draft this complaint.

Yesterday before 7pm, we had power outage on selected houses and at around 8pm I logged a call reporting that we do not have electricity.

I was assisted by Thabiso(with ref: ********** 05) and advised that I will be assisted within 4-6 hours. Looking at the time, I knew that I will most probably be assisted in the morning because we are always told that Eskom technicians don't work at 10pm.

This morning at 730 am, I made a follow up call and was advised that I should be assisted at 10 am and if not, I should make a follow up call on the same reference number at 10:30 am but being human, I decided to call at 11 am. When making that call, I got assistance from Matamela who told me that there was a shortage of technicians but as soon as one is available, he/she will be dispatched to attend to my query and if I have have not been helped, I should make another follow up call at 12:30 pm. Again, with the information that I was given, I decided to give the technicians some time and be hopeful that my problem will be resolved before I even had to make another call. Seeing that time is passing and there is no sign of anyone assisting with my query, I made another call at 1pm this time being assisted by Ronny only to be told the same story and to call at 3pm. At 3:30 pm, I called again and spoke to a lady by the name of Reshoketsoe and whe she also told me the same story, I decided to log a complain ref: ********** 71 because I could see that I am being sent from pillar to post without any help. At 5:30 pm when making another follow up, I spoke to Kamogelo who told me that a technician reported that my query was resolved at 15:41 and to my surprise, no technician came to assess or attend to our problems and it was a lie and when I asked to speak to the supervisor, my call was placed on hold and hung up after 7 minutes of being put on hold. Immediately I called again and my call call was picked up by Mahlaku who then told me she will contact Karabo, a representative from RFC with my query and I should call again at 6:30 pm for feedback.

I placed my call at 6:50 which was picked up by Reshoketsoe again, a lady who was determined to give me her utmost assistance and she logged my call again with the new ref number ********** 44 after the old one had been closed due to a technician who is full of lies reporting that he fixed the problem which I am still facing.

Now with all that being said, we as the community that is serviced by Eskom do not appreciate such poor service from your technicians because this makes it seem as if all your technicians are not doing their job. We understand that there are a few bad/rotten potatoes that need to be dealt with before they spoil the whole pack because as it is, Eskom is being painted with a bad colour. It is not fair that you tell us that your turnaround time is 4-6 hours and yet you take over 24 hours to assess and fix our problems and to make things worse, there is no communication. I am currently not happy with the service I am getting from Eskom because we know of many locations/areas/places that do not have prepaid meters and the people living there owe Eskom a lot of money but you would never hear them complaining about power outages and if my query was in the Suburbs, it would have been resolved in less than 2 hours. A lot of times, we get to be told lies like "a technician came and the gate was locked or a technician fixed the problem without them fixing anything" and this is becoming a bad habit. Eskom's name is being dragged through the mud because of such people.

Not all but some of your(Eskom) employees need to pull up their socks and start working towards their salaries because they are being paid for actually doing nothing and wasting company resources.

On a lighter note, I would like to show my token of appreciation to the Eskom call centre for doing their job and to Reshoketsoe for going an extra mile in trying to make sure that my issue is attended to promptly. Hope Eskom will take note of such employees and reward them accordingly because they deserve to be compensated better for what they are doing to keep the customers satisfied and giving us hope.

Hope no one gets fired but I would really appreciate if the technicians who are not doing their job are dealt with.