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Monday 28 April 2008

Karoo ignoring users (part 3)

The day is almost upon us. What date? I hear you ask. Well, the date they set for the next tele-meeting. It will not happen now as they have cut off all contact with us and even if they do ring either or both of us we will not be talking to them.

The fact they have ignored many emails speaks volumes for the company as a whole. They have no idea at all how to handle their users and home users in particular. They routinely fleece their customers, be they home based or business base. They routinely slow down Internet traffic etc and worse of all they lie.

They are lying right now about their Traffic Shaping practices. They are claiming that Traffic Shaping will not kick in unless there is "severe" congestion on their network. This excludes such protocols as P2P and Usenet but overall they are still using Traffic Shaping measures to slow heavy users, of bandwidth, down.

Writing about Karoo ignoring users leads me to...

Last week I had the opportunity to talk with 3 separate individuals on 3 separate occasions who work on the Karoo Help Desk (also known as Customer Services). These conversations where revealing especially with regard to routine practices that the management insists, no, demand, they offer up in their capacity as Customer Service representatives.

Each one told me that some customers are routinely ignored (no surprise there then). 21% of all emails to them end up in the Trash folder never to be read. They get several sheets of paper every morning with excuses that they should tell customers when they ring up asking about problems. If a customer mentions any problems beyond their own machine and router then the answer is looked up on the sheets and depending on the time of day that predefined excuse is served to the user. Now, for your every day user this may suffice and some users may even be happy with what they are offered as an excuse but as with most things in life there are those of us who are not stupid.


One thing they, Karoo, never bargained for is the fact that once we are upset about what they have done or are doing we will dig ever deeper until they realise that we simply will not go away. The aim is not to force them back to the talking table but to show them that they do not and never can have, absolute power over the people who work for them nor the people they purport to serve.

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