It is hard for consumers not to despair at the slipshod and utterly disgraceful manner in which they are sometimes treated not just by the government but by private enterprise too.
Private enterprise is supposed to do things better than the government, and it generally does, but when one, two or three firms have a virtual monopoly of a service, customer care sometimes falls short of expectations. Much is said about this over time but, despite all the charters and declarations about customer care dished out from time to time, the situation keeps deteriorating rather than improving.
Customer care indeed! Try and speak about customer care to the hundreds of people who only a few days ago went through so much inconvenience and frustration to reach the counter clerks of a government company dealing with water and electricity bills at Luqa. Or to the many others who have not received a water and electricity bill for months on end, if not for a year. Try to get through, on the telephone, to any big service provider, including commercial banks, and the likelihood is that it will generally take you far more than you would normally expect.
For many years, people have often complained of inefficiency in government departments, with those dealing directly with the people receiving the brunt of the people’s displeasure. There is still a great degree of inefficiency in a number of departments, and in government corporations, but the introduction of some services online has made life a little easier.
By contrast, however, service providers in the private sector, such as Melita and Go, are, for one reason or another, giving the consumer much cause for complaint. But the company that must take first place for disservice these past days is Arms Ltd. One would logically think that Enemalta and Water Services Corporation had set up the company to put their billing structure on sound foundations. Sadly, there appears to have been very little sound planning before it took over as the people hit by its horrible customer care service could see for themselves when they called at its Luqa office.
Was it not simply pathetic for ARMS Ltd to first blame the long queues outside its office to what one of its spokesmen described as the number of mistakes made by consumers in the updating of personal data? Why did it not open offices in more central locations in the first place? And what is one to make of the excuse brought up by the Finance Minister that what contributed to customer care problems was a bug in a new computer system? Did it have to take that long for some computer whiz-kid to kill the bug?
No, the biggest problem was surely not the bug or that some consumers may have amended their personal data incorrectly but the company’s inability to plan well ahead and cope efficiently with the problems as they arose. At least, the Prime Minister has now owned up for the “poor service” but why did it have to take his intervention and that of the Finance Minister for the service to improve? One would have thought the Prime Minister, or any other member of the Cabinet for that matter, have far more important things to do than seeing to the efficient running of billing company.
It is time for Arms Ltd to pull up its socks.