In this context, “here” was the small backyard of a modest face-brick house in my small coastal hometown in the Western Cape. Looking on from inside were my neighbour, a frail, elderly and clearly unwell man, and a few feet away, a vast, equally elderly mastiff and a Jack Russell.
Despite their advanced years, the evidence of the dogs’ efficient digestive systems was piled in serried, reeking ranks around the lawn, complicating the task of the men from Openserve wrangling a ladder, rolls of phone cable and various tools, and making me question my life-choices, as I had in the last 16 days.
As William turns to the non-camera, a chyron reads: “16 days earlier” and shimmers and swirls out of focus as harp-strings bubble. The chyron then reads “Monday, May 11, 6am” as a major storm hit the Western Cape. The damage wrought was well-documented and I knew the precise moment it changed my day because my Telkom internet access died.
Mainstream and social media were awash (!) with exhortations to stay indoors and my WhatsApps (MTN, still working at that stage) had gleeful memes of log-fires and hot chocolate as the storm raged and the deluge deluged. But on a day that Disaster Management urged the public to stay indoors, I drove around trying to find wifi while winds drove rain like buckshot, propelling roofing, foliage, fencing, garden furniture and livestock across flooded roads and the Stygian sky. The heavens had opened and stayed open, while just about everything else was closed, including anywhere with wifi access.
Still, I was able to log a fault on the Telkom site the moment I could get online at a coffee shop at a garage with rainwater dripping onto my neck from the ceiling and staff and patrons marveling at the sturm und drang that raged outside.
My sense of urgency was justified: A multinational client had a prominent role in a conference that started in Côte d'Ivoire the next day, and in coming days, I would manage interviews across three time-zones. A few days later, two clients would release their financial results. In other words, online contact was absolutely crucial, as in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs-crucial , which was why a message from Telkom – that my attempt to register a fault had failed – dampened my spirits somewhat.
I tried several times again. Same result. Then the coffee-shop’s internet died, as did Eskom’s power, and the power to the cellphone towers. The oft-shared video clip of the mother’s reaction to her teenage daughter Marelise riding her bicycle into a rugby-pole upright sprang to mind, as it would on heavy rotation in the coming fortnight-plus, because there would be many occasions for that.
Power was restored at around 9pm. Telkom and the towers, not. The next few days were a litany of working from the one coffee-shop that was open, then from friends’ dining-room tables, then using a dongle I’d bought and trying to communicate with Telkom using every channel I could. I quoted Marelise’s mom again when I eventually spoke to a human, who said I should contact Openserve rather than Telkom.
In other words, I’d been wasting my time. Eventually I received a mail with a reference number as well as the assertion that there was no way to suggest when my internet connection might be restored. No apology for the delay, no thanks for my patience and my ongoing custom. It was then that I started mailing Openserve five or six times a day.
Despite my frustration, I looked at this dumpster-fire of indifference through the lens of my day-job: Reputation management: There comes a point in any relationship – personal, professional, social, public – where one no longer gets the benefit of the doubt and is assumed to be at fault.
This is as true of municipalities that fail to fix potholes as it is of a date who stands you up repeatedly or an airline that serially loses your luggage. All brands have moments of reputation risk: Power-stations go offline, motor-vehicles are recalled for safety, airline flights are delayed.
But it’s what happens next that counts. It’s why airlines have crisis and disaster simulations and why their communications teams are integral to
those drills, as they should be.
Telkom and your possibly evil, but certainly chronically insouciant twin, Openserve: You have all my contact details because you SMS me promotional offers and invoice me by email on the 12th of each month. I’ve never been a moment late in paying but I know if I was, I’d be contacted by phone, email, WhatsApp, fax, registered mail, couriered letter, telepathic transmission and possibly the Mavericks skywriting plane.
But when my internet went down, Telkom and Openserve were incommunicado. It took fifteen days for a team of humans to arrive. They looked around and solemnly promised that my connectivity would be restored by the end of the day. The team leader even gave me his cellphone number: They just needed to do a quick job up the road and they’d be back quick-sticks. Did they return and fix my internet connection? Of course not. Did the team leader answer his phone? Nope. So, a lesson in managing reputations and relationships: Under-promise and over-deliver.
By the time a completely different team arrived the next afternoon, what stuck in my craw was not so much that I’d been without internet for more than a fortnight. Damage to infrastructure happens in this ’hood so handily nicknamed the Cape of Storms. The problem is that the brands I pay to keep me online appeared completely unprepared, unable to communicate with their stakeholders and totally unfazed about either failure.
So a lesson: When the midden hits windmill, communicate with your stakeholders that you’re taking the matter seriously. Because with the lapse of the benefit of the doubt came the recurring question: How long would it have taken for the fault to be attended to had I not complained repeatedly? There’s the rub. I’ll probably never know.
Standing in my neighbour’s yard, watching the workers wrangle cables and ladders through foliage, all while avoiding Messrs Mastiff’s and Russell’s massive leavings, I realised the team leader du jour wasn’t there. I checked. He was in his bakkie, chillaxed as anything.
Perhaps I was so disgruntled by then that I was reading too much into what I saw, but this felt allegorical: Why was I, and not he, standing among the reeking turds, I asked the non-camera as I broke the fourth wall? Another lesson: A moment of reputation risk is an opportunity for your leadership at all levels to show up and to show that they take the situation seriously, because when you don’t, people notice.
Telkom works fine as soon as there’s a glitch. Then everything falls apart: The munchkins down the shop at the mall with sky-high rent will happily get you a sweet deal on the latest cellphone with the foldable screen and the AI software that can make me – with the chiseled, aquiline features of a prolapsed soufflé – look like a 20-year-old Brad Pitt.
But when something goes wrong, as it does at least every couple of years, it’s like it’s the first time that’s ever happened. Perhaps their operations are so intuitive that they only accept attempts to log a fault from humans whose blood-pressure is life-threatening and are muttering enough Marelise-words. Or perhaps they’re training for the wrong situations that can drive retention or loss of customers, because right now, the only reason I’m still a customer is because there’s a waiting-list for the local ISP operation.
It appears the service- providers know that changing ISPs is a schlep, and rely on that.
Experience suggests that the billings department and whatever they call the one dealing – or not, as they case may be – with technical faults, customer complaints and escalations are siloed and not talking to each other, nor building capacity to manage crises. The remedy I’m suggesting is certainly not revelatory. It’s as old as Norman Schwarzkopf’s “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” It’s really worth a try. Perhaps then, Marelise’s mom would be evoked less often.
