In response to customer complaints that Telkom is rounding its invoices up to the nearest five cents, the company has given its telephony invoice a makeover in order to make it more understandable to its clients.
According to Telkom`s executive of marketing services, Naas Fourie, the redesigned invoice will be more user-friendly and will offer customers more detailed information about their call usage.
"We have altered three things that will make it easier to understand the invoice, notably we have catered for the discontinuation of the one and two cent coins, we now display billing down to three decimal points and we have reduced the number of call types from 34 to just five," he says.
"In order to cater for the discontinued cents, customers will now pay a rounded down amount, with the additional cents deferred to the following month. Thus, for example, if a user`s bill is R100.53, they will pay R100.50, with the remaining three cents showing up on the next month`s opening balance."
Fourie says Telkom`s billing system calculates call costs to the third decimal, but because the invoices only showed two decimal places, clients sometimes could not reconcile their invoices exactly.
"Now that we will be showing three decimal places, customers will be able to more exactly work out their costs, using the mathematical rounding principle of rounding one to four down and five to nine up," he says.
"The third decimal point on the invoices does not indicate any change in Telkom`s rating methodology, it is simply a change in how we display the figures on the bill, to allow customers to reconcile more accurately."
He says the detailed invoice used to show up to 34 different call types - such as conference calls, sharecall, automated services and a different call type for each mobile operator - but these have now been reduced to five.
"The call types that will now be shown on the invoice are local calls, long distance calls, international calls, special services - such as 1023 - and mobile calls.
"An additional advantage to this is that on the call detail report, we will now be able to display call usage according to call type, with each subsection sorted in chronological order, whereas previously calls were displayed chronologically, irrespective of type."
Fourie says the enhanced invoice will be available from this month, and while he expects the volume of call centre queries to go up initially, he believes that once clients are au fait with the new bill, it will lead to a reduction in the number of calls received.
"We want to be in a position where our customers trust our billing and our organisation and don`t think that we will try and rip them off for a few extra cents, which is why we are being transparent about our invoicing procedure, so we can build a greater level of trust with our clients."
Related stories:
Telkom threatens Hellkom with R5m suit
Celebrating 10 years of dialogue
Stop the rogues
Share
