**** poor service

It is Saturday evening and my electricity goes off just after 21:00. I figured that I should probably top-up my electricity. So I navigate to Protea Metering's exceptionally poorly designed website. It looks like it is something made by a high school IT Student in the early 2000's. Mind you, they do not have an iOS app and the one on Google Play store doesn't work.

I try to log in to my account so that I can buy some electricity, only to find that I cannot log in. All I get is an error message that states: "A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)"

So here I without electricity and unable to buy any, on a Saturday evening. I then try and call their after-hours emergency number ( ********** 851), only to find that I am not able to do so and that I need to send an SMS??? Yes, I was surprised by this unconventional, dated method to log an issue and to receive feedback. As you can imagine, the level of service and information I received from whoever it is that is on the other side of what I presume is an old cellphone in a dingy office, is of extraordinary low level and devoid of any details. Archaic and poor.

I am told I need to wait until "morning" (I assume this will only happen late Sunday afternoon, if not Monday) for someone to bypass my meter. So I ask this person, what time will they be here? Why do they need to bypass my meter as there is nothing wrong with it? Why can't I buy electricity via other means? No, this person cannot tell me when the technician will be here to bypass my meter. this person cannot tell me why this problem is occurring. This person tells me there is absolutely no way for me to purchase electricity by any other means. All I get is a knee-jerk I don't know response. No transparency. No clarity. Just some person sending me pathetic texts.

The part that frustrates me so much is the fact that I did not choose to make use of this company as a services provider, and provided the choice I would not have due to their poor reputation. Unfortunately the complex I stay in only makes use of Protea Metering.

Supposedly "smart" metering, but there is nothing smart about their service in any sense of the word. It is absolutely shocking that they have such a poor website, no app, their choice of communication channels and the fact that they do not have an IT tech on standby to fix their servers when they go down or a technician on standby to attend to matters related to meters.

This level of incompetence, lack of professionality and blatant disregard for their clients (have a look at Hellopeter, Facebook, Google) are shocking, to say the least. I considering taking further action as I believe there to be multiple contraventions to the Consumer Protection Act.

Edit: it is Sunday 09:00 and I still have not seen or heard from this technician. Their website stated that it should be back up by 09:00. Come 09:00 now it states that it would be back by 11:00.