I don’t like to moan about everything when it comes to customer service, but I recently had one of my best examples of poor service! We ran out of bandwidth at the office, a subject that really deserves a whole blog or two in itself, with the ridiculous limits that we are given in South Africa of approximately 5G a month, but the problems began when I tried to buy more bandwidth.

I firstly went onto Telkom’s top-up site and discovered that it was not working. The website indicated that one had to phone their 0800 number which I did, and once they have processed the whole purchase and told me that it had gone through, the lady on the telephone indicated to me that there was a problem with the system and that later during the day I would be sent an SMS with a new username and password.

When you purchase over the phone, and presumably to stop their staff abusing the system, they send you a new username and log in each time. Obviously, especially when your are running a network, you now need your computer experts to reset a few settings, but you will only get to that problem once your SMS arrives with the top-up bandwidth you have just bought. One day later, the SMS had still not arrived and I had to make a plan with my IT guy to run off his account for the rest of the day. It is quite appalling that we have such caps, and even worse when you cannot top-up on the Internet and when you do it on the phone, your order which is going to cost you R350,00, does not even arrive!