‘Call centre is effectively deaf’ – complainant

According to the couple, this happened during a general power outage in Plantation, while the wires were not live on the corner of Cedar and Beech avenues on July 8.The power in the area was restored in the late afternoon, but according to the complainant, their power did not come on again.

Only when her husband went down the road to check the municipal box did he see there was a big gap where their electricity meter should have been.

“The lack of power went on for four days and we were the only house in Plantation without power,” the complainant said.

“I was just out of hospital after an operation and it was cold and miserable and dark, but a person can live with that. We all manage; we all make a plan – if we know what’s going on.

“But what one can’t live with is not knowing what on earth is going to happen.”

The complainant said she started making phone calls once there was no power.

“The Ekurhuleni Call Centre is the villain in this story,” she said.

From Friday to late Monday (July 8 to 11) she allegedly made 16 phone calls in which she managed to get a consultant on the line, and she made at least 30 others which just cut out before she had spoken to anyone.

She also spoke to two supervisors with promises, but no action.

“I went round and round getting to a point where I thought there was progress, only to end up back with a consultant – back at the beginning again.”

The complainant argued that the consultants don’t take in what the caller is saying.

“They just go through the standard procedure like polite robots. I would also become a robot if I worked in such a useless system,” she said.

“The call centre is an out-and-out failure, both technically and in terms of the routing of calls. It’s a place where the consumer gets stopped by a blank wall, a dead end, a blocked communication channel – to say nothing about the ridiculous chaos of the technology.

“The centre may as well not exist, for all the help it gave me.”

When an electrician with assistant finally came to the site, the complainant added, it turned out they’d already been there the day before.

“They had taken one look at the blank space where our meter used to be and assumed, oh well, that consumer must have not paid his account so his meter was removed by the municipality,” she said.

She suspects that this was reported to the system and that is what closed their query.

“So we then went to the back of the queue again – starting from scratch.”

Two reference numbers later, their power was eventually restored on Monday afternoon.

“Four days without power just because of a once-off silly mistake? No – this happened because miscommunication is rampant in the Call Centre system,” the complainant said.

“The technology is already a total failure and now the people are failing too. I would be embarrassed to be in charge of such a monster.

“Ekurhuleni doesn’t listen. How can it? Its Call Centre is effectively deaf.”

The Advertiser is waiting for a response from the Ekurhuleni Metro.