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CK
Catherine K

1 reviews | Active since May 2018

15 May 2018, 10:21

Do not let Vumatel into your neighbourhood - once they are in, they forget all about customer service.

The suburb in which I live made the decision to get fibre through Vumatel in 2016 . We had to endure months of unwalkable pavements and marketing that bordered on harassment for this privilege. I opted for a fibre line, which was installed without too many hitches, although I continued to receive cold calls and unwanted marketing pitches from Vumatel long after I had actually signed up.

I made the (admittedly stupid) decision to retain my ISP account with Telkom, shifting from an ADSL to a fibre service. After endless double billing problems with Telkom (see review), I attempted to cancel this account for a few months and eventually returned from a trip out of town at the end of April 2018 to find that I had no internet in my home. I emailed both Telkom and Vumatel to try and figure out what the problem was. and received no feedback from either. I did attempt to call Vumatel a few times - I got cut off a few times. and the one time I did actually speak to a human being, all she could tell me was that the line was still active with Telkom, but was entirely uninterested in being helpful beyond the terse provision of this information. I persisted in contacting both Telkom and Vumatel, particularly when it became clear that there might actually be a problem with the Vumatel installed CPE. After over two weeks of nearly daily emails to Vumatel, I am yet to hear back from the company. I have had more helpful service from the various potential ISPs I had contacted (most notably, Crystal Web and Cool Ideas), where they at least had the common courtesy to respond to my emails (beyond auto-replies) and try to help. If I compare Vumatel's customer neglect with the hard selling harassment I had to endure when Vumatel first came into my suburb, it seems clear that Vumatel only performs customer service in the short-term - once they have captured a nighbourhood and pretty much your only choices are between Telkom or Vumatel, Vumatel starts to follow Telkom's lead and ignores its customers. Think twice before having anything to do with Vumatel.

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Replies (3)
CK
Catherine K's update16 May 2018, 07:19
Reviewer Update
Vumatel failed to contact me after an hour as promised.
CK
Catherine K's update21 May 2018, 12:59
Reviewer Update
This has still not been resolved. After initial contact was made by Grace after this review was posted, there has been no substantive progress made with this issue. In response to my subsequent daily emails, I received a brief call today from a consultant called Vuqiswa to tell me that the matter was resolved, which it had not been. She promised to call back within an hour - that was three hours ago.
CK
Catherine K's update21 May 2018, 16:34
Reviewer Update
I have still not been contacted by Vumatel. Telkom maintains that the problem lies with Vumatel - Telkom has cancelled my contract and my account has been closed since early May. I sent an email in which this was acknowledged by Telkom to Vumatel last week. As of this afternoon, I can now access the Vumatel shop by plugging to the CPE (which I was not able to do for weeks and have been reporting same to Vumatel without any response). But when I try to place a new order, I am told that I still have a package with Telkom, which simply is not the case. I have used the cancel function on the Vumatel website, but this simply is not good enough - I have been trying to get this resolved for weeks with both Telkom and Vumatel and both have been painfully unresponsive.