By Emma Okonji
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the telecoms industry regulator, yesterday said it has successfully resolved as much as 92,757 complaints from telecoms subscribers within a space of two years.
According to NCC, it received and satisfactorily resolved 92,757 service-related complaints escalated to it for resolution by aggrieved telecommunications consumers in the past two years.
Deputy Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau of NCC, Ismail Adedigba, who made the disclosure in a statement detailing consumer protection activities of the Commission that was presented during a consumer awareness campaign held in Niger State recently, said “Between January 2017 and December 2018, the Commission received a total of 118,784 complaints from consumers, of which 92,757, representing 78 per cent of total complaints received during the two-year period, were successfully resolved to the satisfaction of telecoms consumers.”
Adedigba said 5,010 appreciations were received from some consumers who felt satisfied after the Commission had successfully resolved their issues for them and therefore decided to formally write and call the Commission to express their gratitude for its interventionist efforts.
He explained that the complaints and appreciations were received through the Commission’s various channels of lodging complaints and interactive engagement platforms.
These, he said, included the NCC toll-free Line – 622, which is the Commission’s Contact Centre, the NCC Consumer Portal, consumer complaint redress email, written complaints, social media as well as those received at various outreach programmes, which included Consumer Town Hall Meeting (CTM), Consumer Outreach Programme (COP) and Telecom Consumer Parliament (TCP).
Through the three consumer outreach programmes, which usually held across different states on a rotational basis, Adedigba said more than 31, 202 consumers have been engaged face-to-face and adequately educated on their rights and privileges with respect to provision of telecoms services within the last two years.
He said during such fora, consumer fact sheets developed by NCC on various service-related, topical issues were also distributed to educate consumers on various issues in the industry.
“The Commission places a lot of importance on consumer-related issues. For this reason, NCC has embarked on various initiatives, aimed at enlightening and protecting the consumers to ensure they get quality services, that they are treated right by the service providers and that they get value for money spent on telecom services, be it voice or data.
“Also, we ensure that we embark on initiatives aimed at providing wider service options as well as putting more control in the hands of the consumers to determine what they receive, especially in terms of value-added services (VAS) in line with our ‘PIE’ Mandate of Protecting, Informing and Educating the consumers. We understand the industry is big and we are doing our best to ensure consumer get quality service delivery,” he said.
Further to its determination to put more control in the hands of consumers to determine what they receive on their mobile lines, he noted that the NCC, in 2016, created the Do-Not-Disturb (DND) 2442 Short Code. He added that till date, more than 12 million telecoms consumers have activated DND Code. He assured telecoms consumers that NCC would continue to create more awareness on DND in order for consumers to have control over the kind of unsolicited text messages they receive.
