By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
At about 9:30 am, the queuing tag given to a customer of the Ikeja Electric, Samson Olalekan, at the company’s head office in Alausa was 103. He had resorted to visit the head office of the distribution company to make his complaints after failing to make headway with their online customer care officers, and those at the Abulegba office.
And to his surprise, almost all the people he met at the premises of the distribution company had the same kind of complaints – the new metres installed between November and December isn’t responding to new recharge tokens.
The crowd keeps swelling as more customers thronged the office with the same complaints – they can’t recharge the new metres installed for them.
From the aggregate of complaints TheNiche was able to gather from Ikeja Electric customers at their head office, the metres that were installed came with 100 units of power, and once those units were exhausted, the metres have consistently been failing to accept new recharge.
For some of the customers, the problem has persisted for more than three weeks without a headway. The complaints telephone line which Ikeja Electric provided to resolve such issues has also proven to be ineffectual on solving the recharge problem.
Most of the customers interviewed said they called the phone lines and at the minimum, they were put on hold for at least 30 minutes while their call credit burns out without a solution to the problem.
But Ikeja Electric head of corporate communications, Felix Ofulue, said the problem could be resolved by customers simply calling their customer care number or visiting the company’s website to follow the procedure of loading the cards.
He said via a text message to TheNiche inquiry. “There are processes involved, so customers having this challenge can either call customer services so they can be properly guided or visit our website/social media handles for the instructions on how to load their metres.”
But the processes Ofulue outlined were explored by the customers who spoke with TheNiche without any headway, forcing them to visit the head office.
When one of the customers who had been attended to at the head office of the Ikeja Electric and was given a new set of codes to use in loading his metre, he asked the official who gave it to him if that will fix the problem. The official simply replied him: “I’m not God.”