Yesterday, I had to go over to Telekom to do a simple name change on behalf of my company. I expected to be able to zip in and finish this in a jiffy as it is suppose to be a simple procedure. Alas, no! It turned out to be a two hour affair!
Although there were two counters available, it took them quite a while to settle each customer case. When I took a number #4108, there was 16 numbers ahead of me. I thought to myself, “Shouldn’t be a long wait. I probably could get it done quickly and be on my way to do other things.”
No such luck. It was excruciatingly slow! From 3:20pm I waited. Sitting next to me was another guy; his number was another 15 after mine. We got to into a discussion of the current poor slow service of Telekoms. Just to do something simple we had to wait for such a long time. Not only were we the only ones griping about the long waiting time, many customers were just as frustrated at having to wait such a long time for their turn.
It was not my turn till it was about 4:30pm. Submitted my documents to the service counter lady and she wasn’t very sure of the procedure of company name change. She thought it was switching of telephone line from one company to another and requested me to make a payment deposit and Telekom will refund the amount of the previous company. Huh? I guess she wasn’t very clear about. So after explaining to her again that it was the same company with the same registration number, just a change of company name does not constitute a new company, so why was there a need to make new deposit payment?
After she made some consultation with her colleague, she understood the situation and tried to make the changes to the Telekom databased. Unfortunately she couldn’t make the changes as the process to do so was rather complicated and their database system from what I could note was rather old. She had to seek her senior more experience manager to make the changes.
By the time I finally settled everything it was already 5:15pm. What a waste of time!
For Maxis name change, all we needed to do was just to fax in the request with the relevant documents and they will do the rest. I guess Telekom need to do something about their work system and process. The way they work seem more like the government way then the private sector way. Hope they can improve their level of service the next time I need to do something!