Recommend Telkom? Are you kidding!

From the 11 February 2019 the Telkom line and ADSL line has not been functioning. The explanation from Telkom was that this was because of “load shedding”. I highly doubted this excuse based on all my previous experience dealing with Telkom but foolishly decided to give Telkom the benefit of the doubt. By the 15 February 2019 we still had a non-functioning Telkom fixed line and no ADSL. My wife who’s company is the account holder logged a fault using the automated fault logging app and interfaces. By the 18 February 2019 there was no action taken, the faults persisted, and I personally phoned Telkom. The operator confirmed, “There was something” on the 9’Th of February 2019 that I was not aware off but other than that, there was no fault reported. She transferred me to another operator to report the fault. The operator “tested” the line and confirmed that it was not functioning. A fault with reference number ********** 3 was logged. By the 22 February 2019 the fault was still not attended to. I phoned Telkom again. The operator confirmed that on the 21 February 2019 a line test was done and it confirmed that the line was not functioning. Words fail me. The operator then “escalated” the fault with reference ********** . That afternoon my wife received an SMS stating that the fault was resolved and that the fault will be closes if she did not reply “Yes” within 24 hours. The fault was NOT resolved and the Telkom line was still not functioning. My wife rep**** “Yes” to keep the fault open and phoned Telkom. The operator then confirmed that a technician would be attending to the fault at 8am on the 23 February 2019. Later that afternoon I myself received the same SMS stating that the fault was resolved and if not I was to reply with “Yes” to keep the fault open. I did reply “Yes” to keep the fault open, as the fault was NOT resolved.

On 23 February 2019 I set aside other work and waited for the Telkom technician to arrive at 8am. By 9am unsurprisingly there was no Telkom technician. I phoned Telkom again and the operator confirmed that the fault has been closed and the problem was resolved which it was NOT. She then reopened fault reference ********** 3. Around 11:30 am I received a call from a Cape Town based Telkom representative asking me if I was satisfied with the service. According to him the fault was resolved. I was not since NOTHING was done or resolved. He said he would follow up. I phoned Telkom again and the poor operator escalated the fault again. Reference ********** . On 24 February 2019 late in the Afternoon my wife once again received a SMS notification that the fault has been resolved but with no option to reply to the SMS. 25 February 2019. Tried to get some support from the Telkom community. My post was immediately marked as spam. Tried posting on Telkom’s Facebook page. Phoned Telkom again and spoke to a supervisor called Bianca Bowues. Reported everything again. Bianca Bowues communicated that she will forward the complaint and fault to managers and that it would be investigated. She committed to reporting back to me when she receives any feedback.

28 February 2019. No Telkom technician, no telephone line and no ADSL line. Decided to cancel the telephone line and the ADSL line. No point in paying for something we cannot use. Think you can just cancel? It seems that Telkom does not want to provide a service and when you try to cancel the service that you cannot use, Telkom makes it difficult to cancel. Heaven only knows how long this is going to take. On the up side I’m now saving about R 800 a month an no more dealing with hours on the phone, regular faults, inconsistent services and poor performance. And no more… “it is your router”. “No I have 3 routers and none of them detects the line”. “Yes but you must reset your router”. “What do you think happens when I change the routers?”. “You must reset the router to reset you connection, please reset your router”….. Face palm!

1 March 2019. Why can’t Telkom be as useless at trying to stop us from cancelling the non-existent services as they were at fixing the original problem? One would also imagine that by no Telkom realizes that the truckload of apologies and excuses does NOT solve the problem, carries no weight, and is insincere and meaningless.