The CAMTEL Customer Service Model

Customer service is a bit of an oxymoron in Cameroon. For whatever reason, most Cameroonians don't get the idea of customer service. Generally service here is slow and surly.

Recently, however, an incident involving CAMTEL (the Cameroonian telephone company) brought lousy customer service to a new level. Thankfully, CAMTEL is modern enough to be able to provide DSL service in Buea and other select areas of the country. The organization where I work has a CAMTEL DSL line which we use to power our cyber cafe. It can be a bit slow at times but is generally pretty reliable. We also have a land line provided by CAMTEL. (Most Cameroonians now just have cell phones using service provided by MTN or Orange, the two big cell phone service providers. Land lines are actually rare.)

A couple of months ago, our land line stopped working. The boss called CAMTEL to have them send a technician to see what was wrong. The technician showed up and after playing with some wiring got the land line working again. However, in the process he inadvertently screwed up and cut the DSL wire, so we lost the internet. Since the cyber cafe is the component of the NGO that keeps us in business, not having an internet connection was, shall we say, a tad inconvenient.

After repeated calls, the boss got the technician to come back and basically told him to just undo whatever he had done. Which the technician did - shutting the phone back off but at least getting our internet working again. He then presented us with a hand written receipt for 20,000 francs CFA for the work he just did. In other words, he was billing us to fix the damage he himself had caused. Furthermore, the bill wasn't even a legitimate CAMTEL bill, it was just him freelancing trying to extort money from, allegedly because we made him come out on a Saturday. Boo hoo. To add insult to injury, our phone line still wasn't working.

Understandably upset, our boss refused to pay the bill. The technician left but came back several times in the following weeks to demand payment. He was politely turned away each time.

Then, about two weeks ago, our internet connection went down. Occasional service interruptions are not uncommon here, so at first we didn't think much of it. Just one of Cameroon's many little inconveniences. But as our down time stretched from minutes to hours and then into two days, we realized something was seriously wrong. After checking our network and all our wiring to verify that the problem was not on our end, we called CAMTEL for help.

A team of CAMTEL technicians (including the one who had demanded payment for fixing his own mistake) came and started looking for the problem. After climbing the telephone pole, they discovered that the line had been disconnected.

At that point, the technician who'd screwed up our connection the last time announced that he was the one who had disconnected the line on his own time because we didn't want to pay him. His colleagues were just as shocked as we were. This was a really really dumb move, even for Cameroon. When our boss threatened to take it to his supervisor at CAMTEL, the other technicians begged him not to, because telling his boss would get him immediately fired. Of course, when I heard this my response was, "That's the point isn't it? This bastard should be fired."

However, my boss is a much kinder and more forgiving person than I am, so he decided to let the guy go and just drop the whole matter. He did however keep a copy of the guy's illegal handwritten bill as evidence. If the guy ever tries it again he'll immediately take it to the technician's supervisor and have him fired.

Ah, Cameroon, where service technicians demand bribes to fix the mistakes they themselves make. What a country.