Such a waste of time

So if you're like me and went with Telkom ADSL and chose not to have a landline you find yourself stuck with the problem whereby you have to call technical support from a cellphone. This means soooo much wasted airtime waiting for anyone to pick up.

My main problem however is that after selecting Faults and choosing to talk to a consultant we are then stuck listening to 2 minutes of promotional material before being connected to the hold music even. Additionally we are stuck listening to a man repeat the message "Should you have had a fault on your Telkom line..." in terribly accented English. What? Couldn't afford to hire someone with a nice voice? Or how about repeating the message maybe twice rather than every few seconds? How's about this, one of you guys pick up your phone and try the options on the call center, test how long it takes for a consultant to answer, find out how absolutely **** your voice recordings are and become frustrated like your clients by the insanely stupid hold track.

Now today was lovely, I call in because I'm getting under 1mb/s speed on a 10mb line, after 10 minutes on hold you are then told Oh No, Telkom is experiencing difficulties nationwide and the technical consultant can't even help you as his system is down. Dear god... update the call system with a message that says so at the beginning rather than waste my airtime.

Honestly Telkom needs to get their act in order, soooo many times I've experienced DNS issues from Telkoms side, so much so I once had to change to using Google's DNS servers instead...

And just try suggesting the online chat for technical support... its beyond useless and ineffective if your internet is experiencing difficulties.

A nice solution would maybe be to offer a toll free line when calling from a cellphone, or a Skype contact, or some kind of IP call instead. Or hell, offer your clients a VOIP phone at a small additional monthly cost, most of us would take it.

Telkom is a huge company raking in millions on a yearly basis, surely you can dish out some cash for effective monitoring systems. Surely you can invest in a proper ticketing system for your internal technical staff and SURELY you can guarantee minimal downtime for your clients. I mean heck, ever hear of backup links or fai*****? So do me a favour, investigate why these downtime events occur, formulate a strategy to proactively and identify future faults, implement a fai***** strategy so when one link is down another can take over while the problem is resolved on the primary link. The technology exists, be at the forefront of innovation otherwise I foresee a future in which Telkom is slowly ****ed by independent Wireless Internet providers. In my suburb people are turning away from Telkom, to companies like Nepic and Wifibre or similar. You are going to gradually lose your client base, just like when cellphones came out, how long did it take you to join that bandwagon? Longer than it should've.