Respect Consumers

The customer, they say, is king. This means companies involved in the provision of goods and services to the public ought to give priority to their clients. Yet, it has hardly been the case. Instances of abuse in catering for public interest in several business areas in Cameroon keep multiplying each passing day. In the past, Cameroonians had mostly corporations providing

public utilities like water and electricity to bother about. With the advent of the information and communication technology, the list of areas of stress for the public and users in particular seems to be on the rise. If water and electricity posed problems yesterday, perhaps due to monopoly and State control with the attendant administrative bottlenecks, it is disheartening today to realise that privately-owned companies have added to the difficulties of consumer woes in the country. Take the telephone and the Internet, which are increasingly making in roads, into the habits of the population. The more people get interested, the more they are confronted with problems either in terms of poor services or high cost with little or no explanations given to allay their frustrations. In terms of cost alone, the mobile telephony companies have virtually championed the cause?? imposing services on users without proper explanation, et alone obtaining the consent of clients before billing them. Mobile telephone users can remember so well how they got up one day to learn that their calls moving directly into the voice mail meant they had to pay for the inconvenience of such a blackout. The downloading of sound tunes for their telephones also had a price attached to it. Several of such offers have been made with a price tag, no matter what it meant to consumers. Of late, MTN Cameroon came up with a service called the ??MTN Zik??. Some customers of the company have complained of receiving information from the firm informing them that they had to sacrifice FCFA 150 for the service without them knowing when they asked for such a service. Without claiming to master the intricacies of the technological investments and know-how required to have the offers to customers within the telephony sector, there is a generalised feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction in the public in the country. There are moments that telephone operators go for days without being able to say why their clients cannot make or receive calls fluidly. Officials of the Telecommunications Regulatory Board (TRB) have always brandished their prowess at intervention to protect the interest of the public. No one will require special eye glasses to see that the TRB efforts have hardly been considered by the public as adequate. Of late, the TRB has been actively present in getting a compromise in the optic fibre imbroglio. The regulators must know that they face the hard choice to vigorously defend consumers who need to feel a sense of State protection in the face of growing disgust against telecommunication operators. It is only by so doing that the State can avoid a situation of anarchy. Failing which, members of the public could feel a high sense of abandonment and settle on unorthodox solutions to their difficulty. Also, public utility sectors like water and electricity, which have survived for long in their unfriendly operation modes, have done so only thanks to State backing. But that too can be short-lived as people get more aware of their rights. Interminable queues for the payment of bills and unanswered public frustrations are some of the murky seeds that either the state or the private companies must avoid to ensure that costumers in Cameroon are respected and protected by stakeholders.
Richard KWANG KOMETA, Cameroon tribune

Ne manquez aucune actualite !