National Customers Day
National Customers Day
From Bisnis Indonesia
The report on the National Customers Day carried in Bisnis
Indonesia, Sept. 2, 2003, amazed me. President Megawati
Soekarnoputri officially inaugurated the day on Sept. 4 by
signing a first day cover for new National Customers Day 2003
stamps, a picture of which was published on the front page of the
same paper on Sept. 5.
Color photos of the State Minister for State Enterprises, 15
state enterprise president directors, and the chairman of
Frontier (a marketing & research consultancy firm), attending the
ceremony marking the inauguration of this national day were also
carried on page 5 of the paper, accompanied by various slogans
espousing better customer care and satisfaction.
As a customer, I would like to appeal to state enterprises to
provide customer service in a fair manner by creating a
professional system of charge determination so that customers
will not be threatened by having service cut off or having fines
imposed.
In the case of the state electricity company, PLN, the
collection of charges should be done by sending bills or
statements to customers (as is done by the state
telecommunications company, Telkom). In this way, customers will
receive a formal notification of the amounts they have to pay.
Such bills or statements should also serve as receipts for the
payments made in previous months so that customers need not save
all the bills from the preceding periods. To date, costumers have
to pay the charges for earlier months or years if they cannot
produce evidence of payment -- for example, in a case where the
receipt has been lost. If they do not make such payments, their
electricity supply will be cut off or fines imposed within two
weeks.
I wonder how it is that the loss of a bill that has already
been paid can also result in the "disappearance" of PLN's record
of the payment. PLN should thus establish a special section to
accommodate customer complaints with its findings being made
public through the media.
S. SUHARIMAN
Jakarta