Vumatel: YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE STINKS!!

A year ago I noticed my account was performing poorly in relation to international upload speeds. I logged a ticket with my ISP, Cool Ideas, and was immediately fobbed off and basically told 5% of max line speed on international was the norm. Okay.

Roll on and a year later, after a little digging I realize customers using the same ISP and fibre provider, in the case Vumatel/Cool Ideas, are achieving far better rates of upload using 3rd party cloud programs such as Dropbox and iCloud. Like 50%-70% of max line speed!!

Clearly, as suspected a year earlier, my line isn't performing normally.

Once again I log a support call with Cool Ideas and this time I'm asked to perform an iperf test. This is a tool designed to identify packet loss and as anticipated I'm getting 40%+ packet loss on my line. Cool Ideas, clearly just a middle man in all of this, escalate the issue to Vumatel.

Now this support call was logged on the 17th of October 2018 and what has proceeded over the last 5 weeks has been about as frustrating a customer experience as I think I've ever experienced. Definitely in the Top 10 so congratulations to both Vumatel and to a lesser extent, Cool Ideas and becoming the new Helkom of the telecoms industry.

It has literally been a backwards and forwards exchange with one blaming the other. To expedite a solution I've been corresponding with Vumatel via social media IE twitter and what an eye opener that has been.

You’d expect a telecoms company to employ a social media liaison officer to be at least able to follow the thread and timeline associated with the original tweet. I’ve been asked 3 x ‘did I send the test results to support’? and 4 x ‘what is your ticket number’? all in the same thread. Wow!!! Just…. Wow!!

I don't want to bore you with the particulars but bottom line it's 5 weeks later, I've just had a new ONT installed but have been without Fibre since yesterday 1pm cause the thing hasn't been configured. All attempts at finding out why and when this ONT is likely to actually sync, have been met with complete radio silence. So, this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

5 weeks later and between Vumatel and Cool Ideas they have absolutely no idea why the line is experiencing such heavy packet loss, just that it is. 5 weeks later and the only step taken to alleviate the problem is to replace the ONT with one that isn’t configured and doesn’t sync rendering my account defunct.

Please don’t respond to this complaint with some or other generic response. Rather channel your resources and energies into solving the issue!!

YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE STINKS!!!