I won’t complain. I just won’t come back - Brown & Williamson Tobacco Ad
It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier. - Doug Smith
Much of my posts in recent times on this page and on the Facebook page of Customer Care Reports seem to have focused more on the banks (particularly Access Bank Plc) and the mobile network providers. I guess the reason is probably because almost everyone at least in urban areas over the age of fifteen has a mobile phone and most people with paid employment (even in the absence of any real money to save) have at least one bank account. In other words, a lot of us, if not most of us, are affected in one way or the other by activities of the managers of these two industries. For a very long time before I read the complaint sent in to
The Punch newspaper by a reader about how the
N5,000 (Five thousand Naira) she paid into her savings account dwindled to just over two thousand Naira within a period of few months without her doing any withdrawal, I had wondered why money kept in savings accounts in Banks in Nigeria should reduce over a period of time rather than increase since Banks are even supposed to pay interests on the account. In most parts of the world, Banks are supposed to deduct charges mainly on actual transactions on an account. These transactions can be in form of cheques paid in or withdrawn on the account, it could also be in form of payments for issuance of bank drafts and even for text alerts placed by the customer on an account. I currently maintain accounts in two banks, one of which is Access Bank Plc (which took over the rights and liabilities of Intercontinental Bank Plc, which was the Bank I actually opened my account with). For some time now, I have been receiving text messages on a virtual daily basis from Access Bank Plc. These text messages are not to inform me that money had been paid in or taken out of my account (in fact, during a period when I needed to be informed by text messages on activities on my account, I received no text, I had to go to the bank myself to request for my statement of account, for which I was charged before I could be aware of who paid what into my account). Virtually all the text messages I receive from the bank are to the effect that I can use my Visa card (which I don’t have) to pay for goods and services and on the ATM when I travel abroad, that I can transact online without having to come to the branch, text messages introducing new products and services of the bank to me and so on. Some of these text messages in fact come across to me like advertisements. No doubt, some of these messages are informative. They contain pieces of information a customer might want to have about the products and services offered by his/her bank. What however mars the otherwise (probable) good effects of these messages are the frequency with which the messages are sent. What makes it even worse, was the discovery, upon enquiry at the bank as to who pays for the text messages, that the charges are borne by the customer!
While I might indeed not mind paying for information on how to make my account work better for me, I most certainly will be very unwilling to pay for the same information, albeit reworded, over and over again. In the absence of me being daft, I am not sure I want to be sent the same piece of information on a virtual daily basis especially, as I have said earlier, if I am the one paying for the information. Closely related to the frequency with which these messages are sent, is the amount charged for text messages received from our banks. Prior to the Nigerian Communication Commission’s recent directive that text messages should not cost more than four Naira, the tariff for text messages ranged from one naira to fifteen Naira, depending on the mobile network, the package on the phone and the destination of the text message. We all however are aware, that the banks make use of bulk text messages which usually do not cost more than three Naira per text. I guess one does not have to wonder too long where the difference between the five thousand naira the lady mentioned earlier paid into her account, and the just over two thousand naira she met in the account a few months later went. Ugh ugh, you guessed right, it was deducted by her bank to pay for the unsolicited pieces of information they felt she needed to be fed daily. It doesn’t matter that some of those pieces of “information” are more or less advertisements which the bank should be paying heavily for. No thanks to the generally bad services provided by our various mobile networks, I have more than one mobile line. Globacom (Glo) entered the Nigerian market with a lot of promise. The first and the only one of the GSM providers which is indigenous in its ownership, it came and changed the face of mobile telephony for the better. Being the first to introduce per second billing at a time when the two providers already in the market told us it was not possible, helping us to get rid of booster cards through which the other two were ripping off the Nigerian subscribers and entering the market with a price that was considered largely affordable when compared to MTN and Econet (after many metamorphosis, now Airtel), Globacom indeed brought a lot of hope to the Nigerian subscribers. Whether Glo has however been able to live up to expectation is very much doubtful. The complaint about Glo’s quite poor services is a subject for another day. The concern of this piece is the habit of Glo to automatically subscribe its subscribers to all sorts of services without any prompt from the customer/subscriber. And there are all sorts of numbers offering daily text messages on a variety of subjects daily for a monthly or weekly fee. Some of these numbers are 30807, 33188, 4040 and so many others I do not now recall. And so without the subscriber subscribing to any of these services, Glo on its own decides to subscribe the customer to these services and automatically deducts their credit for services they indicated absolutely no interest in. Upon the expiration of the one week or one month subscription, Glo also automatically renews the subscription, again, automatically making deductions from the airtime credit of the subscriber. Usually, with services you subscribe to, once you text the word STOP to the number, your subscription will not be renewed. Not so with the services on Glo. Your texting STOP makes absolutely no difference. What makes things even worse is the fact that there is nobody to complain to. The customer care number of Glo almost never goes through. And sending messages to the customer care unit on Glo website is a pure waste of time and effort; it is never attended to. The result of these automatic subscriptions and renewal is that I have stopped recharging my Glo line. I do not lose anything by this, I after all, have two other lines. Glo is the ultimate loser because by ripping me off through these unwanted subscriptions, it has forced me to decide to stop opening my wallet to it. And just like Access Bank that keep deducting my account in the guise of the unwanted and unasked for information, I will take my account elsewhere. It might not be much, but just consider how many more people may do the same and the consequent loss to the bank. Unlike the Brown & Williamson Tobacco advert which says “I won’t complain, I just won’t come back”. I will complain and shout it to the roof top if need be, and I still won’t come back! Kindly like our
Facebook page and let us have your customer service complaints and commendations, you never know, it just might change the face of customer service for the better!
While I might indeed not mind paying for information on how to make my account work better for me, I most certainly will be very unwilling to pay for the same information, albeit reworded, over and over again. In the absence of me being daft, I am not sure I want to be sent the same piece of information on a virtual daily basis especially, as I have said earlier, if I am the one paying for the information. Closely related to the frequency with which these messages are sent, is the amount charged for text messages received from our banks. Prior to the Nigerian Communication Commission’s recent directive that text messages should not cost more than four Naira, the tariff for text messages ranged from one naira to fifteen Naira, depending on the mobile network, the package on the phone and the destination of the text message. We all however are aware, that the banks make use of bulk text messages which usually do not cost more than three Naira per text. I guess one does not have to wonder too long where the difference between the five thousand naira the lady mentioned earlier paid into her account, and the just over two thousand naira she met in the account a few months later went. Ugh ugh, you guessed right, it was deducted by her bank to pay for the unsolicited pieces of information they felt she needed to be fed daily. It doesn’t matter that some of those pieces of “information” are more or less advertisements which the bank should be paying heavily for. No thanks to the generally bad services provided by our various mobile networks, I have more than one mobile line. Globacom (Glo) entered the Nigerian market with a lot of promise. The first and the only one of the GSM providers which is indigenous in its ownership, it came and changed the face of mobile telephony for the better. Being the first to introduce per second billing at a time when the two providers already in the market told us it was not possible, helping us to get rid of booster cards through which the other two were ripping off the Nigerian subscribers and entering the market with a price that was considered largely affordable when compared to MTN and Econet (after many metamorphosis, now Airtel), Globacom indeed brought a lot of hope to the Nigerian subscribers. Whether Glo has however been able to live up to expectation is very much doubtful. The complaint about Glo’s quite poor services is a subject for another day. The concern of this piece is the habit of Glo to automatically subscribe its subscribers to all sorts of services without any prompt from the customer/subscriber. And there are all sorts of numbers offering daily text messages on a variety of subjects daily for a monthly or weekly fee. Some of these numbers are 30807, 33188, 4040 and so many others I do not now recall. And so without the subscriber subscribing to any of these services, Glo on its own decides to subscribe the customer to these services and automatically deducts their credit for services they indicated absolutely no interest in. Upon the expiration of the one week or one month subscription, Glo also automatically renews the subscription, again, automatically making deductions from the airtime credit of the subscriber. Usually, with services you subscribe to, once you text the word STOP to the number, your subscription will not be renewed. Not so with the services on Glo. Your texting STOP makes absolutely no difference. What makes things even worse is the fact that there is nobody to complain to. The customer care number of Glo almost never goes through. And sending messages to the customer care unit on Glo website is a pure waste of time and effort; it is never attended to. The result of these automatic subscriptions and renewal is that I have stopped recharging my Glo line. I do not lose anything by this, I after all, have two other lines. Glo is the ultimate loser because by ripping me off through these unwanted subscriptions, it has forced me to decide to stop opening my wallet to it. And just like Access Bank that keep deducting my account in the guise of the unwanted and unasked for information, I will take my account elsewhere. It might not be much, but just consider how many more people may do the same and the consequent loss to the bank. Unlike the Brown & Williamson Tobacco advert which says “I won’t complain, I just won’t come back”. I will complain and shout it to the roof top if need be, and I still won’t come back! Kindly like our Facebook page and let us have your customer service complaints and commendations, you never know, it just might change the face of customer service for the better!
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