MTN Ghana has apologised to customers for the recent hitches on its network and announced that it will give 100% free data for any purchase made over the period of the challenges, ending midnight of December 2, 2019.
MTN Ghana Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Selorm Adadevoh, who made the announcement to journalists, said the recent challenges were due to technical hitches related to the implementation of the tariff adjustments to accommodate the Communication Services Tax (CST) and remove expiry dates from some data bundles.
Since December 1, 2019 when MTN implemented that new tariffs to include the 7% CST and also remove expiry dates from selected data bundles, customers have been facing a number of challenges.
The challenges included transactional failures through Mobile Money, customers getting far less data volumes than they paid for and customers not familiar with some new functionalities in the bundle purchase menu since the tariff adjustment.
MTN initially issued a circular stating that the hitches were purely a technical problem and it was working on them.
Mr Adadevoh said it had now fixed the challenges with Mobile Money purchases and will also implement the fix of the less data volume challenge on Tuesday night to ensure that customers got exactly what they paid for.
“We would like to apologize profusely for the inconvenience caused to our customers and also give them value for their patience and tolerance through this brief period of challenges.
“In effect, any customer who made any purchases between December 1 and the midnight of December 2, 2019 will get 100% bonus for every purchase they make within that period,” he said.
Mr Adadevoh said this is in keeping with MTN’s focus on the customer this year as reflected in its mantra ‘We Dey 4U’.
He said post the removal of the expiry, customers would now have the options of the Flexy Bundles and the other already existing bundles so they can choose which packages suit their lifestyle and consumption patterns.
The MTN CEO noted that as part of the changes, some data bundles like the GHC3 and the GHC10 bundles were removed and that got customers confused, but those bundles would be restored into the menu for interested customers to have access to them.
Asked if the hitches were deliberate to make government unpopular for imposing directives on them, he said MTN has been committed to following the directive from day one, so there is no intent to make any stakeholder unpopular.
It has also been suggested that a directive by government for telecom operators to remove expiry dates from data bundles was an interference in telecom operators’ commercial activities and product development.
Mr Adadevoh said indeed decision on tariffs is a purely commercial one meant for individual businesses to make but MTN is a law abiding organisation and would also remain committed to pursuing that provided it is in the interest of customers.