Flow – taking entertainment to a different level?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Yesterday I had the chore of contacting Flow customer service as my services had all vanished – again (this happens with a regularity that is uncanny – about every two weeks), and then became engaged in a most odd conversation via WhatsApp with an agent. I am not denigrating the agent at all, as they can only use the information they have at hand. I’m just using this to point out a glaring deficiency in the Flow information management structure.

After having gone through all the regular stuff, i.e., unplugging, restarting etc... I was then told that where I lived there was no outage. These are snippets from the conversation:

Agent: Thank you for patiently waiting, John. I have checked the account and your area and as of the moment, no outage has been reported yet.

Me: This is a repetitive outage that only appears to bother a small number of customers. Every two to three weeks this happens.

Agent: I have looked into the aforementioned matter thoroughly for you and I am able to confirm that this is not related to an outage. I’ll be happy to escalate the situation and open a ticket for a technician visit on your behalf.

Me: So why does my neighbour have the same issue?

Agent: Regarding your neighbours’ services, I’m honestly not sure of the current situation on their account. But, I can confirm that the issue you’re currently experiencing is not related to an outage.

Me: All around me, as I have been checking, the service is down and some people get messages on their phone saying that it is down and is being worked on. So something somewhere is not working properly.

So here we have a situation where I and my neighbours have a service outage but Flow Customer Service either has no knowledge of this or declines to recognise it. The message my neighbour received on their phone reads thus: “Flow is aware that your service has been disrupted due to network interference. Our team is investigating the issues to determine the restoration timelines.”

So that has confirmed that there was an ongoing outage, yet the agents in the customer service centre had to operate with such a paucity of information that they were embarrassed when the customer knows more about the situation than they do. Flow should radically improve the information about current service issues so that customer service agents are aware.

I now realise why my neighbours very rarely contact Flow if and when the services vanish as they all get different responses.

Has anyone else noticed that Flow does not have a person or email address in any of their information concerning complaints? I suppose if you don’t have a complaints line then you can say you never receive any!

JOHN HILL