4th January 2019
Having one of those crappy days from hell at the beginning of the year (Warning long ranting post) - and since Facebook killed most blogs I rarely post here
First off I'm up for a super early flight to Entebbe, my first business trip of the year and get to the airport. I board early and have only carry on luggage. This white couple come late and the lady has nowhere to put her little bag and sine she is sitting at seat no 1A it has to be put at seat no 3 hold. she makes a fuss and wants it to be put in the luggage hold inside the plane but cabin crew tell her its not in use for this flight. so after some while she opens luggage hold and removes my laptop bag and places hers and is now looking for a place to place my laptop bag. I firmly tell her she can't do that and she stares me down. So i rise and take my bag and put it back. upon which she tells me that I have done that because I'm racist. Now I'm livid and take her on and raise a ruckus and the flight is delayed. the whole plane is with me and i tell her she has to apologize for calling me racist otherwise she is not getting on the plane. So the pilot comes along and tells her she has to apologize otherwise she is getting ejected from the plane and security gets called. she says she can't apologize if she doesn't feel like it. finally under duress she looks at me and tells me she is sorry (I don't think she is though) pilot turns to me and asks me if i accept the apology - I give her a hard time and asks her what is she apologetic for (to make her realize her mistake) and finally accept the apology. hatch gets locked and we taxi off.
Shortly before take off pilot comes over the intercom and says Entebbe Airport is closed and we can't take off and we will be taxing back to parking and deplane. so soon as we are back and doors get opened i gt online and checking to realize that the incident with Entebbe has been on for 6hours before our flight. so technically, I think what the Jambojet crew do is that they know the airport was closed and they had to log the flight so that they can come back - you do this by locking the hatch and taxing and soon as you come back the airline needs to look for new crew. So we deplane and are led back to terminal and no further information is coming. So Entebbe airport opens up 2 hours later but we have no crew and no information from Jambojet. Four hours after deplaning we are told next flight is at 7pm and we have an option of a meal voucher. i think there is more that we are entitled to. i am furious and have waited so many hours since cock crow and now i have to wait all day to catch the evening flight.
On a positive note as we wait in the terminal, the daughter of the lady i had ruckus with comes to me and apologizes on behalf of her mom and tells me it is inexcusable what she did and tells me she hopes this stops with our generation.
Meanwhile at 7am I tried to do a normal bank to MPESA transaction from NIC Bank, my bank of 15years. money leaves my bank account but doesn't show up on my MPESA. meanwhile i have workers in the farm waiting to be paid. Looks like from the turn of the year, NIC Bank has had issues with their systems and whenever they have issues they seem to adopt the Ostrich head in sand approach and they are unreachable. so here i am trying to call them all day and it is now 3pm with no luck.
As if that is not enough, I used the mobile app (yes the bank one!) to pay for my Home Broadband on the 30th December 2018. (I typically use MPESA to do this but because i was trying to balance The Boat (Ask my Uganda counterparts about this) 4 days later, the bank and the Broadband company are giving me the runaround and nobody is acknowledging where the money is - this made me appreciate the deep integration work that Multichoice has done over the years on payment options which reflect almost unreal time and service is back up. (Lucky though for me as an ex employee i always have speed dial to my peeps at Multichoice and always get speedy resolution).
I was told a while ago when I moved from Zuku to Jamii Telkom that whilst Jamii Telecom service would be great but their customer service is poor when you really need them - and that word of mouth advise has held strong and I'm now paying for my choices. Safaricom Home fibre was not in my hood when i made the switch to JTL, but I'm also personally of the view that we need to balance the boat with this Safaricom thing (i hope i don't get nailed for this in the future for this) - but its just some classical advise of not putting all your eggs in one basket. to give credit to them, Safaricom has really upped their game on customer service and whilst the re is always room for improvement but they are up there with it as far any service oriented provider.
On a positive note soon as I typed Zuku above, I got a call form them! - that is very spooky. My account has been off for 6months and i have hardly got a call from them - maybe someone is spying on me or that must be super duper SEO that prompts them to call when i call their name. SO finally i have renewed my Zuku for a retrial period and lets see how this goes. the beauty with choice is that you don't have to take BS from any supplier/service provider, so this is me exercising my options
So much for 2019 starting off like this. So on the overall, I think it is possible to disrupt any industry with a me too product by upping up Customer Service
