The oxymoron of customer service

There's a nice 'what the customers say vs what the company says' in Gulf News today which sums up customer service Dubai style.

I've described it before as: we give them our money and they decide whether to give us anything in return, what and when it will be. We must not complain and they don't need to apologise or explain.

In the two items Etisalat customers say:

A banker was recently kept on hold 20 minutes before the customer support representative picked up her call, not knowing that the number she had called was not a toll-free one.

Upon discovering how much she was charged for the call, she demanded to be compensated for the lost credit. "Why should I be paying to wait for them?"

She was told that the matter would be looked into but said she never received a response.

A subscriber of the company's Al Shamil DSL service called technical support at 4am and was told after a half-an-hour wait that the person responsible had left the office for the night.

An Al Shamil subscriber had an intermittent connection for five days, had lodged a complaint "many times" but received no response.

"I called them with a complaint and was given a reference number and told that a technician would call me. I never received the call so I called Etisalat back and was told that my complaint had never been registered," he said, adding that he waited for two more days but no technician called.

Another says: "For a whole year, I had an intermittent DSL connection. Every time I called Etisalat I was told that my complaint has been filed and I should expect a call and a visit from a technician soon. The technician came a year later after a number of calls and a demand for compensation," he said.

Yet another says: when he had difficulty accessing the internet Etisalat said a technician would call within a week. "It's been more than ten days now."

Etisalat says:

On average, the waiting time for internet customers is between 2 and 3 minutes.

Etisalat has provided alternate methods of getting in touch with its customer service staff which can be utilised during peak times.

Recent improvements in customer support levels have been acknowledged by customers "in writing".


And for all of us who think we've been struggling with unbelievably slow or intermittent service over the last few days - we're wrong.

Etisalat says:

There is no general outage in internet connections in any part of the UAE

There have been no "major issues apart from individual cases".

Khalifa Al Shamsi, Vice-President Marketing, said that the network had been performing very well.

So will you all please stop complaining, pay your outrageous perfectly reasonable bills every month and leave Etisalat in peace so they can continue to provide us with their marvellous service.


The stories are here and here.