The past few months the public has had a lot of complaints in the way MTN Uganda is delivering it’s services, disgruntled customers vented on social media using the hash-tags like #OccupyMTN to try and get MTN Uganda’s attention.
Today, the CEO of MTN Uganda Brian Gouldie held a press conference to address some of the issues that have been raised via these various channels. Brian says it’s very important to have an ongoing engagement between MTN and the public and that’s why MTN wants to bring out some of the facts to the numerous opinions that have been aired out via the different channels.
Customer Service
There was an upgrade on 30th of June and 281,084 customers were affected by this upgrade. What MTN has done is refunded 778 Million in Airtime to the affected customer and has also credited the bundled that these customers who were affected by these intermittent occurrences had subscribed for. Combined MTN has rebated approximately one billion shillings (shs. 1 Billion) worth of data bundles and airtime.
Harmonizing Short codes
About having a harmonized short code like other service providers, Brain says, “MTN has 3.5 million transaction a day that go through our systems, we are in the process to migrate but if you have customers that have been using these codes(155,156) for 15 years, this will take time because we have to educate the public about these changes. For us to be able to do that as company, we have to work with the regulator to make sure our customers are treated fairly. Therefore, we are going to work with the commission but this will take time because we don’t want a case where our customers can’t load airtime over the festive season.”
Spamming By Content Providers
“Our Content providers have been responsible for generating the billing transactions, and they have been keeping records of the customers who were interested in their given service. As operators we have been facilitating the billing process on behalf of the content providers. There are 7.2 Million customers who have accepted to be provided with content on our system. From today all that has changed, MTN is now controlling the content management system and every 30 Days, customers subscribed to any content provider will automatically be removed from the system and will need to subscribe again in order to access these services,” Brain remarked.
Tax Evasion
“MTN Group is listed NO.5 on the Johannesburg stock exchange, we get auditted by both internal and external Auditors and PWC handles audits for MTN Uganda. We have been awarded by Uganda Revenue Authority(URA) as the top tax payers numerous times. To add on this URA has been validating our tax returns the past 15 years, these awards actually mean we pay money and comply by submitting our Tax declarations for VAT, Customs Duty, Corporate and Excise Taxes,” Brain Highlighted.
In 2013 MTN paid 336 billion Shillings and they anticipate to pay around 439 Billion in 2014. The issue of the 13.4 Billion shilling was resolved to 1.3 Billion which MTN Uganda didn’t agree with, but paid anyway.
Brian also talked about the different audits that are going on in the company and said Audits should be frequent and continous and this should be for all operators. The commission shouldn’t just audit when there is a problem.
Well, that’s what you might have missed today. We are going to follow on with a story about the anti-spamming technique and how it work. Feel free to ping us if you have any questions.
