It was a regular day;
the sun was not shinning more than the day before, the temperature appeared to
be the same as the day before and the day before that. Gbemisola Oni woke up to
another day that was full of promises. A day she believed had something fresh
and exciting for her. She started the day like every other; as soon as she
opened her eyes, she said a prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of another day
and committed all her activities for the day into the hands of the Almighty.
After this, she got out of bed and went about her usual chores. The day
appeared to be playing out the same way yesterday did until she remembered she
needed to get top-up for her line since she no longer had any airtime on her
line and needed to make a call in a couple of hours.
Gbemisola Oni took a
stroll to a store close by and bought the top-up. On getting home, she entered
the activation code into her phone. To her utter dismay, it came back with a
message 'You have entered an invalid
activation code' instead of 'Your
top-up has been successful'. She tried to enter the activation code two
more times and she still got the same error message. Refusing to get worked up,
she decided to call the 'call centre'
of the telephone company to speak to anyone who could assist her in rectifying
the error message. While Gbemisola goes through the long process of getting
someone to speak to her from the call centre, she was still pondering on the
error message. 'Did I do something wrong?
Did I miss out a number? It was plain!' she kept thinking to herself.
After minutes of waiting to be put through to an actual person not an automated
voice, she heard a female voice.
'Good morning. My name is Christy. Welcome to our call centre. How may I
help this morning?' Gbemisola was a bit relaxed with the friendly voice she
was hearing from the other end of the line so she went on to say, 'Good morning. I have an issue loading the
top-up I bought about an hour ago. I need your help loading the top-up.'
Christy then replied, 'For records may I
please know your name ma and your location right now?' Gbemisola smiled and
then said 'My name is Gbemisola and I'm
calling from Ikeja'. 'Thank you ma and are you calling from your own line?'
Christy said. Gbemisola decided this was the best time to log her complaint. 'Yes I am. I called the call centre because I
cannot load the top-up I bought for this line. Every time I entered the
activation code, I got an error message saying the activation code is invalid.
I find it really surprising because the pin code is complete and I just
scratched off the seal myself'. By this time, Gbemisola was beginning to
get worked up. Christy sensed that
Gbemisola was getting worked up and calmly told her to please read out the
serial number she could see on the top-up card then told her to please hold on.
'You said you couldn't load the top-up ma
and that it kept giving you an error code. I can see that the top-up is still
very valid ma. This is a 500 naira top-up card ma, right? Please can I have the
pin code so that we can load it from here for you ma.' Gbemisola goes on to
verify that the top-up card is indeed a 500 naira card and then read out the pin
code as seen on the card. Christy verified the pin code matched the serial number
that Gbemisola had earlier read out. 'I
have logged in the complaint ma and soon after this call you will receive an
SMS letting you know that your issue is being resolved. Thank you for calling
this call centre. Is there any other thing I can do for you ma?' Gbemisola
thanked her and asked again if the airtime would be automatically loaded to her
line and Christy assured her that it would be 'Thank you for calling the call centre again and do have a lovely day
ma'. 'Have a lovely day too Christy.'
Gbemisola clicked off the phone and decided to patiently wait for the call
centre to do its job. While she was still trying to decide whether to go buy another
top-up or not, an SMS came into her phone from the call centre assuring her
that her complaint had been raised as a query so she decided not to buy another
top-up since the issue was soon be resolved.
To be continued...