Wendy Knowler steps in to resolve a consumer's nightmare experience after requesting a simple internet speed upgrade

Our consumer ninja, Wendy Knowler, has long championed the need for companies to have a "higher-up" whose key performance areas include advocating for the consumer.

A recent case study illustrates, once again, how customers' legitimate complaints so often don't reach the right ears, resulting in wasted time and effort.

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The central question is: Why does it require intervention by a consumer journalist to solve a relatively simple problem?

In this case, Durban resident Charlene made what is really a straight-forward request of her internet service provider.

She asked Mweb to upgrade her fibre plan from 30 megabits per second to 100 and received a confirmation email that this had been done.

But all the provider got right was to increase her debit order amount by the stipulated R434 - the upgrade itself didn't happen.

As Knowler often points out, mistakes do happen but then there must be a process to get the mistake fixed.

"Charlene came up against an array of technical, technological as well as human hurdles... for weeks! We've all been there, right?"

The frustrations included circular conversations, dropped phone calls and not receiving the one-time pins required to proceed with support queries.

"She first tried Mweb's technical department and was told the problem related to the fibre line not being opened by Zoom Fibre to support the higher feeds, and that the matter would be escalated and resolved in two days. When this didn't happen she contacted Zoom Fibre directly and was told that in fact Mweb had given them an incorrect request."

"Charlene says that in her attempts to resolve this she spent countless hours trying to contact Mweb by phone, by livechat and other online channels."

She went as far as lodging a complaint with regulator Icasa and the Internet Service Providers' Association, but "didn't receive any meaningful feedback or resolution".

Once Knowler took up the case with Mweb's marketing head, they were quick to apologise and get the issue resolved for the client.

The exec acknowledged that the problem was due to an internal system error, and pledged that additional monitoring and retraining would happen to avoid similar failures in future.

"This scenario is not confined to this one internet service provider - it's very common, across the board. And having to come through me to get this simple problem sorted out is really not the way it should be."

"The trouble is that they don't have an internal trouble-shootig mechanism to red-flag cases like Charlene's with someone who's going to be willing and able to get to the bottom of the problem, without the consumer having to go external."

For more detail, listen to the interview audio at the top of the article