Useless helpdesk assistants giving pathetic customer service (on incorrectly activated softcap on fibre)

I can only hope that this review will help other people to save them from suffering too much with Telkom. I understand very well that things don't always go smooth. We all make mistakes, and we all have glitches in our systems, but every company should try their best to provide good customer service. Customer satisfaction is greatly based on how quickly and efficiently problems are getting resolved.

So here it goes: Telkom asks if I am interested in upgrading from ADSL to Fibre in January 2019. I do, so I request an uncapped 50/5Mbps line. All runs fairly smooth (cancelling of ADSL must be done yourself, so it's bit of a hassle to cancel the one in time not to be paying too long for both products). Then after enjoying the speed of fibre for a while you go on extreme slow speed (0.1 Mpbs?!?). So it seems they activated a softcap. After some phone calls it seems that a 20/2Mpbs capped was activated. The person requesting it in their system must have made a mistake. It takes several follow up phone calls (whilst frustratingly being on slow speed) to upgrade to 50/5Mpbs. Luckily, I was only getting billed for the 20/2Mpbs which was activated. So in July 2019 I finally get upgraded to 50/5Mpbs. And then... it seems that it is still a softcap package of 100Gb, but meanwhile in their billing system it shows uncapped. So you basically pay too much. (But then again since Telkom is one of the more expensive providers you would be paying too much regardless of what is done in my opinion). By the way, by asking them to "correct" the package to 50/5Mpbs uncapped, you automatically consent to a new 12 month contract with them.

Weirdly enough, Telkoms helpdesk assistance cannot communicate to other departments... You can keep phoning or emailing (if the email inbox at Telkom is not full with other people complaining). They keep insisting that all is good, because in the billing system it states that I have uncapped internet. So the billing department states that you need to phone the sales / technical department and the sales department keeps telling you that you need to contact the billing department. I won't even go to the responses where they state that you need to contact the department for mobile phones whilst you have a query on a fibre line connection. Don't know if I have already mentioned that some of these assistants are not in my personal opinion not only *********** but actually completely utterly useless and not worthy to be working at a helpdesk as they clearly don't want to even bother doing what they get paid for.

Anyway after months and months of emailing and phoning I finally get a clever person at the technical department to figure out what is wrong, but the response is that they can't fix it. Somehow a softcap of 100Gb is activated at the back end system, but the account has to be closed and another (new and correct one opened). There is no other way to solve it apparently. What they don't tell you is that if you open up a new one, you automatically consent to another 12 month contract which I figured out going from the 20/2 to 50/5Mpbs. What a bonus for Telkom, not? Telkom makes a mistake, they over-charge you and let you suffer with slow internet speed once you reach the softcap. Hopefully you even buy a top-up bundle just to enjoy your internet. Then you loose on the refund you should be getting, because a refund is linked to an account that they will close for you. And after that, you are stuck for another 12 months with this pathetic customer service and quite expensive service provider. (Yes, this has been confirmed by a Telkom assistant on an email that all of this would happen). Various calls and emails now explaining the complete situation have been done (with the fault reference from the technical department and solution in the email). I even request a refund as they have by now been overcharging me for almost R4,000 due to the incorrect package. But each case logged keeps getting closed with : "Rejected". Luckily for Telkom they can find so many reasons for rejection (such "case logged under adsl, not fibre". Meanwhile it is actually a Telkom assistant that logs it for you under the wrong sub category.... I love the business plan where the company makes a mistake and then can just reject your request based on another mistake that that same company makes. ) Up until now, after about 100 emails and "I don't even know how many" phone calls I have given up on getting it resolved. Clearly nobody believes in customer satisfaction at Telkom. With a CEO not guiding this company in the right direction I personally believe it can only go further down with Telkom. At a certain point I even tried to get higher up the ladder at Telkom (even to CEO level) to explain Telkom that there is something wrong with their customer service (in order for them to learn from it) So, desperate to give it one more shut to follow up on my complaint I go inside a Telkom store and request feedback on the ticket that was logged and speak to the manager to see if she can make some phone calls to the correct people. Only to find out one other reason for rejection. Fed up with Telkom I request to cancel my account that day and fill in the paper work which the Telkom assist should be sending to the correct department. Following up on my cancellation request about 2 weeks later, Telkom's response is : never received... I should have known better! I should have just spent the time to do it online in the first place. Looks like the cancellation is getting processed now with regular text messages stating that it is in process.

Lessons learned: if you as a customer feel that after a couple of times you are getting nowhere with the helpdesk, then just cancel it as soon as possible.

No response from Telkom required: 1. I have taken peace with the fact that I will never get the refund that the technical department confirmed should be paid. 2. I have gotten so many responses already on my emails and phone calls. If you couldn't solve it in the past probably 100 logged cases, I don't expect you to solve it this time. Statistics are unfortunately against you. 3. Shouting tp Telkom doesn't help. Sounding desperate at Telkom doesn't help. Swearing to Telkom doesn't help (but it made me feel better). Being very nice to Telkom certainly doesn't help.