Telecommunications

SA telecoms: the best and worst operators

Derrick Cramer

 ·22 Feb 2012

HelloPeter.com, a website allowing users to provide positive or negative feedback about companies, yields some interesting insight into the satisfaction rate among customers of South African Telecoms providers.

The site has a list of most complimented and most complained about companies. Telkom occupies the top spot as the ‘most complained about company who doesn’t respond’, though this does not tell the whole story.

Companies who have the ability to respond pay an annual subscription fee to HelloPeter. Paying this fee not only allows one to respond, but ensures that they won’t feature on the “most complained about” companies.

A more accurate measure would be to compare the amount of compliments versus the amount of complaints received by a company on HelloPeter. The table below lists the complaints/compliments ratio of Telecoms companies:

As we can see from the table, the three big mobile operators have far more complaints than Telkom. However they also have more compliments, which means all of these companies have a much better satisfaction ratio than Telkom, who finds itself at the bottom of the table with the worst approval score.

One needs to bear in mind that HelloPeter is most well known as a site where consumers can air their grievances with companies, which explains the high amount of complaints versus compliments.

Another measure of a company’s approval rating is to take the number of complaints received and compare that to the number of subscribers. The table below lists the complaints and compliments per 1,000 subscribers of the same telecoms companies:

It is interesting to note that Neotel has gone from having the highest complaints/compliments ratio, to the highest number of complaints per 1000 subscribers.