******* by Telkom punctuated by poor assistance by its employees/agents

My bad experience with Telkom starts with them phoning and enticing me to renew and extend my contracts on two 3g lines at the beginning of February 2020. I accepted the offer which was a total of R200 for both (10 gig each) lines for 24 months. In the communication that I had with the agent she instructed me to phone the number 081180 the following day to have the data usage capped at 10gigs. I made the phone call as instructed on the 5th of February. I went to the extent of confirming with call centre agent on this day that they had capped both lines to which they gave assurance thereto.

At the end of the month April I was taken aback to realise that I hade been debited an amount of R646.33 instead of R200. It so happened that on the 2nd of June I was at Menlyn Shopping centre and I decided to walk into one of the Telkom shops to query this charge. To my amazement my lines were not capped. It was only on that day they were capped to 10 gigs. I then requested that I wanted this extra charge to be reversed and the agent escalated this and she gave me a case no (***9). She also instructed that I can, in the meantime, request a recording of the conversation that I had on the 5th of February - requesting that the lines be capped, for purposes of validating my query. She said Telkom will contact me and she said that normal it takes 72 hours but this could not be guaranteed because of the Covid-19. In the Month of May I was charged R533 and in June I was charged an extra R61 on top of the R200, and this was referred to as “Account subscription and once off charges”. I never received a call as promised. It was on the 11th of June that I phoned to request for the recording that I learned that my case had been closed and there was no refund to be made because I had used out of bundle data in one of the lines – which was untrue. When I requested the recording of the 5th of February, the call agent T. Sesing said it was Telkom’s policy that they do not give out phone recordings. He said for me to get the recording I should go and make an affidavit at a police station and enlist the services of a lawyer. In between he was consulting his supervisor. I questioned this tedious and expensive procedure that one had to go through as a result of Telkom’s commissions and omissions. In conclusion he said he will escalate the issue to his supervisor and I should expect a response in 24 hours. To date (14/07/2020) I have not heard from them.

To conclude I am disgusted by this treatment and in hindsight I should have thoroughly considered the extension of the contracts had I known I was going to be treated this way. I am seriously considering cancelling the lines

Disgusted Customer