Garth Rattray | That oxymoronic, choked ‘FLOW service’

The Internet revolutionised communication. For the most part, email replaced snail mail. The instant way of communicating words, pictures, videos, entire files, and programs through various platforms are commonplace and indispensable. Our lives adapted to the new paradigm. Everything from romance to finance depend heavily on Internet communication. And, with this pandemic, the Internet is how many stay in touch with friends/colleagues, keep pace with life, learn, teach and earn a living.

Between home services, personal phones, office Internet, office phones and office mobile phones, my wife and I pay bills for 12 accounts monthly. A building without Internet communication is anachronistic. It is out of phase with the necessities of modern existence. For all intents and purposes, such a building is ‘dead’. Reading, entertainment, communicating, managing exigencies, paying bills and other of life’s perfunctory tasks often need Internet connection.

FLOW has been in Jamaica for a long time. It has merged with several aspects of our economy and established a symbiotic relationship with our nation. Massive sums of money are pumped into advertising of one sort or the other. But FLOW is failing terribly in how it treats with customer complaints.

FRUSTRATION AND BEWILDERMENT

Complaining about service is always an adventure marked with frustration and bewilderment. I find it ironic that FLOW’s service is fraught with dropped calls when customers try to call, or during a conversation with an agent. The last time that I called for help, it took me six tries to finally get through. It was nerve-racking because I feared being cut off at any moment and being unable to reconnect.

FLOW’s WhatsApp service appears efficient, until you realise that they might respond fairly quickly, or perhaps the next day – you never know which. And, if you happen to miss their reply to your message, woe be on to you, because you shall have missed that vital window of opportunity and must begin from scratch. If Lady Luck is kind to you, and you eventually communicate with a living human being, a (simple) solution may take days, weeks or months!

I have lost service for weeks at a time, and for about a month on at least two separate occasions. I managed to get the first month-long loss of service reported after doggedly trying repeatedly. When I got to speak with an agent, it was discovered that my complaint was misfiled! And, the category in which it was filed would have made the repair team do nothing about it indefinitely. I am currently experiencing another period of no service for a month. Again, after much trial and failure, I spoke to an agent who discovered that my file was placed “on hold”! Only God and FLOW know why that is so and what it means. They basically said, don’t call us, we will call you ... . I called again, anyway, and I’m still waiting.

CALL SOMEONE HIGH UP

In order to get a repair done sometime last year, I had to call a friend, who called a friend of a friend very high up, who sent the technician the next morning to do the very simple fix (a wire had become loose on a pole). The first-contact agents seem to be doing their jobs, but the folks at the next tier sometimes mess up in a major way.

The Internet is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. Whenever we lose service, we must continue paying the expensive bills, or else. FLOW excels at billing customers; whether you have service or not, come rain or shine, come hell or high water, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, you are going to get billed – and swift and severe action will be taken if you falter. FLOW needs to become just as efficient in their repair service. The company extracts money despite weeks of down time; it therefore risks coming across like its anadrome, a lupine predator.

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.