Opinion: Customers’ agonies with mobile phone service providers

by Niyi Akinnaso

Menacing promotional messages are only one kind of problem. Other more serious problems vary from unauthorised charges and dropped calls to service congestion and no service at all.

Last Thursday, April 11, 2013, between 1:51pm and 2:25pm, I received eight text messages from Airtel, my mobile telephone service provider, each conveying exactly the same message: “ENTER into Airtel’s wonderful internet world with the 4MB ENTRY plan at JUST N50! …”. I don’t know about you, but I have received well over one hundred promotional text messages and phone calls from Airtel this year alone, and I have not been in the country all of the time.

Sometimes, Airtel is displayed as the message sender. At other times, the message comes from a four- or five-digit number, notably, 3030, 5840, 30044, 31990, 35685, 38046, 38047, 38052, 38490, and 38661. I am implored to send a specified text message in reply in order to take advantage of a new product, feature or data package, or to improve my chance of winning something.

To entice customers, the win-something message often begins with congratulations. Here’s a typical example: “Congratulations, (my phone number) is rewarded a chance to win N1,000,000 CASH for free today by Airtel! Send your name to 3030 for free”. Since my SIM card is registered with Airtel, why couldn’t they retrieve my name and enter it into the draw? By the way, if I am being congratulated for “a chance to win”, what would they say to me if I actually won?

Even when seasonal greetings are sent to a subscriber’s phone by your service provider, the primary purpose is often to sell something to you. Airtel has wished me everything from Happy Sunday, New Week, and New Month to Happy Christmas, Valentine, Easter, and Independence Anniversary, embedding one kind of promotion or the other in each greeting. What is worse, the concept of Breaking News is routinely abused. Here’s an example: “Breaking News!!! Just loaded for the week, Call 141 now for details. Hurry!!!” Where is the news in this message, which I have received in various forms at least 10 times this year?

Too bad, you cannot opt out of promotional messages. The Airtel office representative that I contacted for help referred me to the Customer Service Centre. The agent at the Service Centre told me pointblank: “There’s no way to block your phone from receiving promotional messages. But you can always delete them, if you don’t want them”. When I told the fellow that, in civilised societies, that’s called an unfair trade practice, the response was quite suggestive: “This is Nigeria”!

Like the Nigerian government, mobile phone service providers often take subscribers for granted. Just as the government capriciously changes tariffs and the pump price of petrol, so do mobile phone service providers whimsically change their charges. Sometimes, they even make unauthorised deductions from your credit balance. The point is that both institutions are working against your interest, while appearing to be doing you a favour. Government officials routinely cart away oil money while mobile phone service providers rake in huge profits from their customers’ hard-earned money. Yet, both provide nothing but inadequate and poor services.

Menacing promotional messages are only one kind of problem. Other more serious problems vary from unauthorised charges and dropped calls to service congestion and no service at all. To complicate matters, many service providers’ recorded messages often lie like fish: I once called my wife’s number on the same network, while she was standing beside me with her phone turned on, only to be told that her telephone number does not exist on the network! Worse still, I was charged for the call.

Most Nigerians employ an èyí-je-èyí-ò-je (a gambling) strategy by purchasing multiple SIM cards, each from a different mobile service operator. I followed the bandwagon by purchasing an MTN line on my BlackBerry, which is dedicated to Internet services. But the story is the same. I once loaded N3,500 worth of credit voucher for my data plan. The cards loaded successfully alright and I got the usual “Y’ello! …” message after sending the appropriate migration code to 131. But nothing happened afterwards and neither a local MTN office representative nor a Customer Care agent could resolve the problem. I eventually purchased MiFi, a portable WiFi device. It, too, has been subject to MTN’s service fluctuations.

Others have shared their frustrations with mobile phone services. Airtel representatives told Taiwo Obe that he had not renewed the data plan on his phone, even after there was evidence he had done so (The Guardian, September 2, 2012). Out of frustration, he reverted to Airtel’s modem on which he still had some N2,000 credit. The modem worked for one day, after which he repeatedly received this message: “The connection was terminated by the remote computer before it could be completed.” He switched to MTN, where, to his discomfiture, he experienced a different problem. The new MTN SIM card he purchased and instantly registered at an MTN office would not work, after loading enough credit for his chosen data plan. When he eventually got through to an MTN Customer Care agent, Obe was told: “I’m sorry, you have to go and register (your SIM card). I believe you have a recycled number…”

Moses Ogungbade had yet a different complaint with MTN: “I did not register with MTN for any caller tune … MTN should stop advance deduction of N50 for unsolicited and non-existing caller tunes from my credit balance every 21st day of the month” (The PUNCH, February 27, 2013). Similarly, Samuel Oladoyinbo thought he had been duped by MTN’s promotion tagged “Double your recharge”. He loaded a N1,500 worth of credit voucher. However, “on checking my balance, it was not credited with either the value or the bonus” (The PUNCH, April 14, 2013).

In civilised economies from which mobile telephone technology migrated to Nigeria, the customer is king. And wherever the customer is Number One, services are optimally efficient. It is only in Nigeria that customers are treated shabbily and cheated with impunity. Three different parties are to blame for different reasons. First, government officials have grossly eroded social and moral values by engaging in corrupt and lawless practices, while also disrespecting the citizens who voted them to office. Their practices have become infectious. Ìyá aláta will cheat and abuse you. Roadside mechanics will cheat you. Motor park touts will insult you. Okadariders will curse you for not giving them enough room to overtake you on the curb side.

Second, this pervasive culture of corruption, lawlessness, and poor treatment of customers provides a fertile context for mobile phone service operators to routinely shortchange their customers. They operate with infrastructural deficits and subscribe customers beyond their capacity. They get away with anything, because the officials empowered to regulate their activities have been compromised. The Nigerian Communications Commission has been more interested in SIM card registration, because money changed hands, than in ensuring customer satisfaction. The result is an overall poor service.

Third, Nigerians are culpable as complicit citizens and docile customers. They often wait for their rights to be grossly violated before they react. Why not demand better treatment and better services from mobile phone service providers before it is too late? The time to begin this is just now.

For a start, the NCC should look critically into the problem of over-subscription and oblige mobile service providers to expand their hard- and software infrastructure to accommodate all subscriptions. In the meantime, Airtel and other mobile service providers should be compelled to provide customers with an option to opt out of promotional messages.

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Read this piece in PUNCH

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

One comment

  1. Truly speaking, it is high time we fight for our right and let them realized that we’re no fools.

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