Randolph In 1994, South Africa entered the cellular phone market. You could either get with Vodacom, 50% owned by the hated Telkom (and the other 50% by Vodafone, who now has a controlling share), or “the better connection”, MTN.
In the last 14 years, MTN and Vodacom have been producing profits in the tens of billions of rands. MTN has reached out into Africa as well, cornering the Nigerian market too. These are big boys.
Anyway, this weekend, MTN’s entire network crashed. Their. Entire. Network. Crashed. Okay, so maybe it happens, but we’re talking a 14-year old company with billions of rand (or hundreds of millions of dollars) in profit every year. This doesn’t happen. Then again, apparently it does.
Let’s see what happens when the SABC tries to get comment.
When the national broadcaster phoned the help desk for comment, the “call centre spokesperson … didn’t want to be identified.” I’m not surprised – I’ve had the same issue with my calls to technical support with almost everybody I’ve dealt with, primarily Sentech, M-Web, Internet Solutions and Hetzner Africa. If you do get through, you speak to someone who gives you their first name, no surname, and refuses to put you through to someone higher up the food chain. Plus, in most cases, you’re treated like a criminal. There is no such thing as customer service in this country. But I digress.
According to the article, the call centre spokesperson “said that engineers were aware of the problem and were working around the clock to fix the fault. He said most parts of the country were affected. Officials from MTN were not available for comment, the broadcaster said.”
That was yesterday. Today, as a follow-up, there’s this article, which proves that call centre staff are the lowest common denominator, who read from a script, and can’t think for themselves.
[Disclaimer – my first job was in a call centre. It was the most painful five months of my life.]