When deciding to move to South Africa, I was warned by Cousin Sean that I would be pulling my hair out with the level of service that we would recieve. If it was not for the 90p a glass champagne and the sunshine, I would most certainly be bald by now after only 2 months in the country.
After a day on the telephone to the bank, I am writing a list of reasons not to do business in South Africa.
This is not to say that we regret coming to this country, it has many things to offer. My advice is come to South Africa, but leave your business office in the UK.
Reasons:
1. "I will call you back" - only 0.01% of the time will this hold true.
2. Monopolies - since when should internet be so expensive? why does internet need to be capped? For £20 in the UK you can have super quick unlimited broadband.
In South Africa £20 does not even cover your telephone bill to the internet provider each week in complaint calls.
3. Internet only works between 7 at night and 11 in the morning - this means you must be nocturnal.
4. Call Centres. We may complain continuosly in the UK about our call centres, but, at least be grateful they are not based in South Africa. Even when speaking to our bank local branch face to face, we were told it is of no use to use the call centre.
5. Internet Banking. We have now been over a week without access to our bank, a change in system has led to 15,000 internet bankers being without access to their accounts. For a week we have been relying on the infamous "I will call you back" way of working.
6. There's no instant access to Robin, Robin is a must in any business. In fact when we did have a problem he resolved it over the phone in 2 minutes. We were even on the verge of flying Robin over to sort everything out (in hindsight this would have been cheaper than our all our calls to SA suppliers trying to help).
Having said that, the face to face customer service we have received has been great.
It looks as if in 2 years time, our head offices are moving back to the Barn in Bilsington. (We must start saving!)
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2 comments:
live is there to challenge you. If it was easy then everybody would be doing or going to SA and that would be boring. After redaing your blog page I retract some of the things I have said about the UK. However I can also pull my hair out. We miss you in the Barn but "stick it out, try turn SA around and show them that Perk's are not easily defeated! p.s. You are always welcome back in to your old office!! Take care of each other love dad.
Hi Dad
Are plan is to have "The Barn", we will buy it off you, but do not worry you can still keep the garage for working on your cars.
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