Vodacom has a competency challenge!

The single Vodacom tower that services the Leeuwkloof Valley in at Leopard's View Lodge, which is about 12kms north of Roodeplaat Dam, has had significant signal losses over the past 3 weeks. What is even more alarming is that their electronic threshhold alarms have not picked up anything and certainly the team that should be monitoring the performing is drinking coffee or something else but not their job .

For more than 3 weeks, literally hundreds of the more than 400 lodge owners in this area - some with important oversees guests and tourists - have been battling with not only constantly dropped calls but also 90+% outages on Internet.

On our community WhatsApp group it is evident that many had tried to report the issues for more than two weeks as I have. Finally on the 26th of April after literally days of frustration trying to penetrate the dense, untrained customer care facility, I posted on HelloPeter in desperation. The next morning I got a call from the section in Cape Town handling HelloPeter and she promised to sort it all out! I raised 5 issues in my post to HelloPeter.

"1) The Leopard's View tower – north east of Pretoria, has been faulty for almost 3 weeks now. Yesterday and this morning, the Internet came on for 2 - 5 mins a time and then disappeared for up to 15 mins at a time - no one can run a business with a service provider that cannot monitor its own system alarms or fix a problem like this over 3 weeks!

2) Any attempt to contact customer care at Vodacom is like a brick wall - solid and impenetrable! The only calls they are capable of answering are standard cell phone related ones. Any attempt to report a network problem has to run the list of standard questions for cell phones. After I was put thru to the 4th *********** I cut the call realising just how deep the incompetence is.

3) The menu picks on the #135# are equally frustrating as they are illogical in sequence and try to avoid operator contact at all cost in an effort to frustrate an intelligent person.

4) One of the options offered if you have a network problem is to go on line and check their website???????

5) Vodacom's Facebook page has not been updated in 5 years as of yesterday morning!!!!!! Who are these people that are in charge of these basic services?

Bad service levels, bad basic customer care business processes and *********** frontline staff! This is the fault of Vodacom management because they do not train their staff properly!

At least give data users a separate contact number that works!

Now watch their customer care address only one of these points as they did the past 3 times."

Yip the technical help desk lady called me and I was given a reference number A2-FFN8-W1512E. So, this morning, the same lady called and asked me how it was. I explained that the Internet had been better since last night but still intermittent breaks. Dropped calls kept happening.

As true as apples, this lady closes the call! Two seconds after her call, the system reverts to 95% unavailability.

As I put in my call review: "I will bet you that they will only respond to one of the 5 issues" and it happened just as I said! Disgusting, Vodacom!

No, Vodacom, there are no other service providers in this area else, for sure, we would not be having this convo!