Telkom Billing problem - Debit order mishap and now I can't get my money back!

I've never experienced such bad service from any institute before!

In May this year, a Telkom staff loaded my bank details against someone else's Telkom account. A debit order went off my account on 31st May for R474.69 and I assumed that the payment was for my Telkom account. When I got my Telkom statement, I realised that the debit order isn't reflecting as a payment on my statement and as a result, I'm now in arrears.

I went into the Ballito branch where I was connected to their Billing Department. After a very lengthy investigation, trying to figure out what was going on, the Call Centre Agent finally figured out the problem and then logged this as a dispute (Dispute No. ********** 9) for the payment to be allocated to my account. I understand mistakes do happen and at that point I was relieved that this is going to be resolved...but I was so wrong!

A month later, I noticed that this hasn't been done. The only thing that was done was that the debit order was changed so that I now pay my own Telkom account and not someone else's account. But the re-allocation of the payment I made in May via debit order (R474.69) had yet to be allocated to my account.

Since then I made a few more calls to follow up on what was going on and the agent told me that the dispute had been "CLOSED"...I've had no feedback yet the dispute was closed, without any action - is this how Telkom resolves issues???

On my last call to Telkom, I've asked for this matter to be escalated to a Manager. The agent advised that the manager will contact me...that was two weeks ago. I have still not been contacted, nor has my problem been resolved.

In addition, for all these months waiting for this issue to be resolved, I've been charged "late payment fee" even though this was NOT MY ERROR...

I've now reached a point where I'm not sure what else I need to do for someone to help me resolve my problem. All I ask is for MY money to be allocated to MY account, after an error on YOUR part...why is that so difficult?

I'm really regretting signing a contract with Telkom...