[kictanet] Quality of Tech Support with Kenyan Telcos

[Odhiambo Washington]

Apologies in advance for cross-posting.

I'm somehow very appalled at the level of technical support we get from our
Telcos. What surprises me is the fact they they have some of the best brains
in the market, yet they simply cannot get these brains to address the
consumer problems. A simple problem can take you ages to get solved --
unless you go behind the scenes and contact these techies at a personal
level.
I've come to the point of thinking that either there is too much bureaucracy
introduced between the people we talk to (the CSEs) and the engineers who
work in the background or the escalation process simply isn't streamlined.
The process of getting a solution from the engineers can take ages (to me, a
week is ages!). Then again, the Customer-facing teams simply seem to be
robots who don't want to try and reason out. Is thinking out of the box not
acceptable for CSEs working in these Telcos??

Take one such problem that I'm facing currently with one these Telcos -
ORANGE: I bought their much touted 21Mbps modem. The issue at hand is that I
need to share the Internet connectivity with other residents of my house via
a WiFi router. My router, a D-Link DIR-825, has a USB port that supports a
3G modem. There is one obstacle that I must overcome with the ZTE modem for
me to be able to use it with my D-Link router -- I must find a way to
disable the virtual CDROM and card reader from the USB stick/modem. The
problem is no technician at ORANGE knows how to do this. Probably there is a
technician (I have a feeling Orange must have gotten ZTE to train some
technicians, or in the daftest form, ZTE must have seconded some techies to
Orange!) but it's not possible to reach him/her/them!

My router already works with the Safaricom's Huawei E1820, because I was
able to go-ogle and find the AT Command to use to disable the virtual CDROM
(AT^U2DIAG=0 does the disabling; AT^U2DIAG=1 re-enables it if I need to),
which then enabled my router to recognize the USB modem. Fortunately, after
installing the drivers on a computer, I really do not require the virtual
CDROM interface anymore.
I have not been able to find an equivalent command for ZTE-MF192 USB stick
and has called Orange Customer Support (Data+Internet) so many times and
they simply don't have a clue as to what I am asking for. I'd have thought
they are trained to know that some clients are more demanding than others
and as such they are allowed to go the extra mile and reason outside the box
to help such customers.

I am not sure  if I am expecting too much, but because I paid money to get
this modem, I'd expect Orange to help me in any way that I'd like to use the
modem. They still make their money by allowing me to use it.
What I don't seem to be able to wrap my head around is why there is no
technician at Orange (whether native or Chinese) who can help me with this
problem? Aren't we supposed to expect a better quality support from these
Telcos than we are getting now??

I started by generalizing on "Telcos". I have only detailed my problem with
Orange, but such problems are not exclusive to Orange. I remember Robert
Yawe has detailed his own tribulations with other Telcos on this very forum.


-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
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