Telecommunications giant, MTN has apologised to its customers for the poor service they have endured in the last couple of days following the implementation of the 9% Communication Service Tax (CST) and the readjustment of their pricing system.
At a press conference held at their head office, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MTN Ghana, Selorm Adadevoh, explained that customers had faced three issues:
The first, he said had to do with customers receiving volumes that were lower than they expected.
According to him, the second problem involves some transactional failures with mobile money (MoMo) accounts.
He said the third challenge had to do with customers being unfamiliar with the new functionality being implemented and therefore being unable to find their preferred bundles.
Mr. Adadevoh said that MTN had so far resolved the issues related to MoMo transactions.
He said, “customers who made purchases and did not receive the data bundles have been refunded. We also looked at the challenges with the MoMo functionality itself that have been resolved, so today if you go into the MoMo menu to buy a data bundle, that option should complete.”
He assured customers that the challenges regarding MoMo “have since been resolved but we’ll continue to monitor and make sure that there are no further issues when it comes to purchasing of data bundles from the MoMo platform.”
He disclosed that there should be some corrections to data volumes, which would see customers getting the expected levels of value.
Mr Adadevoh explained that though they had intended to implement the new tariff regime on November 26, they faced some challenges which they would be resolving.
He said, “in terms of the volumes specifically, yes, when you implement a tax adjustment to your pricing, there are two things we can do. For example, if you have a GH₵2 plan that gives you a certain amount of volume, you can either increase GH₵2 by the tax, or you can reduce the volume by the equivalent of the tax. And these are the two mechanisms.”
“In our case, for most of our bundles, we would adjust the bundle volume down to accommodate the tax component.”
Mr. Adadevoh went on to explain that the reason MTN had decided to implement a non-expiry was to give their customers more value.
This, when done in tandem with the flexi bundles, he said, “would mean that we’ve not only given our customers more value, but we’ve also given them flexibility. The combination of this, is to ensure that our customers post incurring an increase in effective prices due to the tax actually get some additional value from some additional functionality that we’ve built into them.”
“The primary objective of the tariff increase was to adjust our prices to accommodate the 9% CST tax. In doing that, we’ve taken two or three more steps to implement flexibility and to also implement non-expiry,” he added.
Mr. Adadevoh went on to say that due to popular request, they would be bringing back the GH₵3 and GH₵10 bundles.
He expressed the company’s regret at the challenges faced by their customers as he claimed that “2019 is the year of the customer for us at MTN, so we’ve come up with ‘we dey for you’ and in the last two days our theme for 2019 has significantly been challenged.”
He expressed the company’s sincerest apologies for the issues that customers faced from December 1st.
To this end, he said that “anyone who purchased a data bundle between December 1, and midnight tonight would receive the same value back. We would give back the same value that they purchased, so for example if you bought 100mb of data, you’d get 100mb from us as a way to say ‘we dey for you’ and we’re really sorry for the experience you’ve gone through.”
He also denied allegations circulating round social media that the implementation of the new pricing regime was to make government unpopular.
Source: Selorm GBORBIDZI||thefinderonline.com
