Telkom COO Motlatsi Nzeku has admitted to investor analysts that its customer service levels are not where they should be and have been deteriorating.
Speaking this morning at Telkom`s Analyst Day, Nzeku said the company had little to celebrate now.
"Our call centre needs enormous attention from us. We are not going to see a massive improvement [in customer service levels] overnight. But I do believe we can deliver an improvement trajectory," he commented.
Nzeku outlined the challenges that Telkom had to face to improve its service levels.
"Our bandwidth demand and supply has not been aligned properly and now we are beginning to see mobile players looking to self-provide. On the contact centre side, we initially implemented specialised partitioning of our centres; but this has resulted in us losing scale and volume in times of distress."
He added: "The rapidly increasing levels of copper cable theft and general breakages have had a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Currently, 70% of our faults are in the access network, with 60% in the last mile. We admit that there have been unacceptable delays in service provision and restoration placing additional pressure on our contact centres. This has been of enormous distress to our customers and us."
Widespread "unsupervised" construction, particularly in metropolitan areas, had also led to interruptions as cuts and intrusions into the network occurred, revealed Nzeku.
Fighting on
Nzeku said Telkom planned to take on these challenges "aggressively" in the 2008/9 financial year.
In terms of the problems around cable theft, Nzeku said the team believed the company was progressing in its communication strategy with all shareholders.
"We are lobbying authorities to declare copper a precious metal and cable theft as sabotage. This is going quite smoothly and we are confident we will make headway shortly. Additionally, we are deploying wireless rapidly and aggressively. For this, we are taking deployment from our historic in-house strategy and looking at partnerships with original equipment manufacturers so this roll-out is speedy," he revealed.
Although wireless technology provides Telkom with significant opportunities to reduce its exposure to copper cable theft, it is still carefully assessing which areas best suit its roll-out.
"We have got to consider spectrum availability, assignment and cost. Additionally, we are factoring in the enablement of mobility into our network planning," explained Nzeku.
Telkom`s primary target markets for its wireless deployment are corporates, townships and villages, gated communities and the youth and young adults. It currently has 100 000 wireless "lines"; but is planning to increase this to 500 000 in three years` time.
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