Telkoms' Inefficiency leaves our small Business in ruins

Hi to the Hello Peter world.

We are a small Motorcycle Sales, service, accessories and parts shop based in Durban, some of you might know us, Tidal Motorcycles, we have had our fair share of Hello Peter comments and reviews which we have used to better our business and done our best to resolve these issues to the best of our abilities.

We are now facing a serious issue with Telkom.

We relocated our business premises at the end of September 2017 and went through the necessary steps to relocate our lines. Our initial plan was to relocate our ADSL line to the new premises and have our land line number, which we have had for the past 10 years, Ported to another Service provider, Daisy Solutions. The forwarding of this line was cancelled due to an incorrect line relocation request, which has been blamed on me. Telkom informed me that I requested that the Land line be relocated and not the ADSL line. Fine, I accept the mistake. We then requested that the Land line be reconnected for porting and that a new request be submitted for the relocation of the ADSL line, which I did online and telephonically.

Three months later we still have no line coming into our building.

One of the initial Issues we had was that the Telkom Pole which carries the line was rotten. After the first (incorrect) relocation request was submitted we had the Openserve technicians at the new premises ready to connect the line within a few days. We were very impressed with the turnaround time. They found the pole rotten where they then informed us that they would put and urgent request in for the repair of this pole. Amazingly only a few days later the Telkom crew were here and replaced the pole. Only problem is that they never brought a copper wire into our premises, it was a Friday afternoon and they said they would be back on the Saturday morning to bring in the line. Three months later we still wait for this line to be installed.

All this time without telecommunications services from Telkom we have had to use alternative resources such as Mobile Data and airtime from our cellular network providers. As we all know this is very costly at approximately R120 per Gig of data where we average 3 gigs a day when we are fully connected. 3 gigs per day for past 3 months at the cheapest rate of R100 per Gig. The costs are massive. Not including Airtime. Telkom is happy to forward our line now to a cellular network number so we could at least have our phone calls coming in again but of course this is at an extra cost where we will pay for the call once forwarded and we would be charged per minute for our customers to call us. Some more added costs due to Telkom’s inefficiency which we can ill afford. Subsequently we have had to cancel the VoIP service due to high costs and have requested a complete move of all our telephone and internet services to Telkom with their new Unlimited Business package which is great value for money. But we still are waiting over a month now since we have requested this.

The bottom line is that our Small business has collapsed and everything myself and my partners have invested into this business has slowly been destroyed thanks to the lack of income from our main areas of our shop.

• Retail sales of New Motorcycles, spares and accessories: from having our phones ringing non-stop from customers requesting spare parts and accessories to being completing dead quite. We have seen an approximate drop of 70% of this side of our business. • Workshop repairs, servicing: Our move to a new location was expected to see a small drop off of turnover on this side, however, it has become apparent to us that our new location has served to open a new customer base as well as a very pleasant surprise of our original customer base still being faithful and willing to travel an extra 20kms out of their way to bring their bikes in for repairs with us. These customers have managed to still contact us via our alterative mobile numbers, Facebook, WhatsApp and e-mail facilities. The actual losses in the workshop from customers not being able to contact us on our ten year old number is unsure and we are still trying to calculate this figure. Welcome in 2018 and we are now at our wits end. We have lost so much now in loss of income as well as the excessive costs for data and airtime. Please, if there is anyone out there that could assist us in fast tracking our issue with Telkom, please let us know as we are faced with trying to fight a Multi-Billion Rand Corporation who obviously has no care or regard to the small business which they have systematically destroyed.