Telecom subscribers who feel cheated by activities of the telecommunications operators in the country might soon have cause to smile as mechanism to compensate them is already being put in place.
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), with effect from January 2015, telecommunications operators would be compelled to mandatorily put in place an effective compensatory mechanism to compensate consumers and subscribers whose service rights had been breached or short-changed due to no fault of theirs.The Director, Consumers Affairs Bureau, Maryam Bayi, also stated this at the Industry Consumer Advisory Forum (ICAF) in Abuja said, “NCC is looking at the ultimatum, that by January, they should let us know what kind of compensation they are packing for consumers whose service rights were breached.”
According to her, if for any reason a subscriber’s credit balance was depleted by operators, they should compensate the subscriber far above the credit balance.
“They should come up with something that will make up for it. If you complain about your inability to utilise your data your data services, they should be able to roll it over for you.
“NCC would published and tell consumers these are the things that they will be compensated for and if this is not done, the consumer should refer to NCC for necessary action.”
Commending MTN, Airtel and Etisalat for showing remarkable improvements in their auto renewal packages, she noted that notifi cations are now given unlike before, where consumers credit are depleted without their knowledge.
Speaking on compensation, Bayi said, “A lot of consumers have been compensated or they have been refunded, but the problem that we are having is to create more awareness for the consumers, that there are platforms for them to register their complaints.”
Bayi said issues regarding breached of contract or poor quality of service can only be addressed if consumers tabled their complaints to the operators or directly to NCC office.
“We have brought our legal and regulatory offi cers to tell us the implications of the kind of compensation that we are asking for so that we don’t breach the 2003 NCC Act content.”
While acknowledging that there has been decline in complaints from subscribers over QoS, she added that the complaints vary from service provider to another.
“Usually it has come down to 40,000 complainants across the federation per day. Before now, it was above 40,000. It has now come down. Airtel and Etisalat have improved. In our action plan for 2015, we really want the consumers to be lodging their complaints.
“It has been very diffi cult to get to consumers in the Northeast because of the insecurity. Twice, we have tried to get to Bauchi and Gombe States, we couldn’t because of the security challenges there. We are trying our best to see how best we can reach out to the consumers and how they can reach out to us too.
...culled from nationalmirror
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