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