Late last year Afrihost took the ADSL market by surprise by introducing the lowest per GB rate available in South Africa.
Afrihost introduced its R29 per Gigabyte offer and everybody jumped ship almost instantly including me and since then I haven’t had a problem, until my Credit Card expired leaving my details invalid at Afrihost. I did the right thing and paid my account via EFT and faxed proof of payment through but unfortunately they still suspended my account.
I didn’t notice it immediately as I was on another account due to being capped the previous month, but around the 4th after switching back to my Afrihost account I found out that my account was suspended. I phoned the Afrihost support line and after about 20 mins of holding on I was eventually put through to someone that could help me and update my Credit Card details.
The waiting period had me very upset and I expressed my dissatisfaction on twitter where Afrihost CEO, Gian Visser, picked it up and contacted me. Today I was contacted by Gian Visser and was pleased to find out that they credited my account with a few extra Gigs for the inconvenience caused.
Over all I can not complain about Afrihost, their ADSL offering is superb. I never have a problem with line speed or latency, in fact I get better speeds and latency than on my normal SAIX accounts. As for the long waiting for support, I guess they were just very busy at the time as previous calls to their support line got me through almost instantly.
Afrihost is still running their R29 per GB ADSL offering but it could end at any moment, so I would suggest that if you are not already making use of this cheap ADSL offering get to it. If you sign up for the Afrihost offer now your price of R29 per GB will be locked in forever, oh and have I mentioned that Afrihost has a two for one top-up offer regularly where you can top-up your account with 2 GB worth of data for the price of only 1 GB.
Thank you Afrihost for the extra gigs, I will put it to good use.
At the risk of sounding cynical, how does crediting you with a few gigs solve what seems to be a real issue for such a visible ISP? I am talking about long waiting times, and the fact that they STILL suspended your account after you recitified the situation. Did Gian mention how they were addressing those problems ?
Again, at the risk of sounding cynical, its all good and well to give a customer a few gigs to keep them happy, but what visible commitment do you produce to FIX process mistakes in the first place ?
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Glad you brought that up The Fly, as mentioned with previous experiences there wasn’t a waiting period and I was assured that the matter would be investigated as I shouldn’t have waited that long.
I guess I might just be happy about the free gigs, but I see it as positive response to what happened. The fact that they gave me the free gigs tells me they acknowledge that their support wasn’t what it should have been.
Thanks for the post Gerhard – Once again apologies for the 20 minutes you were on hold & the fact that we allowed your account to be suspended.
To The Fly: I agree with you 100%. A gift to a dissatisfied client does not solve an underlying problem. However, when we put our money where our mouth is it forces us to address the problem so that we will do everything possible to stop it happening again.
To address the 2 specific problems Gerhard encountered and how aim to solve them:
1) The 20 minute hold time. This is simply way to long. Our average hold time according to our PABX system is 1.8 minutes per client. However, stats being what they are they can be misleading: There are times we get a glut of calls and our team is thinly stretched. For this reason we are constantly hiring more team members. We also constantly look for places where we can improve our systems to ensure a client either doesn’t experience a problem or if they do they are able to sort it out easily online if they wish to.
2) The expiring credit card & incorrect suspension. If you have been a client of ours for a while you will probably have noticed that our Client Zone is continuously being upgraded with more features. One of these features we are working feverishly on is to enable clients to seamlessly make changes to their payment details securely online. At the moment this is still a manual process and unfortunately this means that it is open to human error – Which is what happened in this case with the suspension.
Please be assured it is our single minded vision to become the best ISP in the market and we know that the only way we can achieve this is through constant innovation & improvement.
However, having said all this there is no perfect company and unfortunately there will be times we disappoint. And where we make mistakes we aim to acknowledge it and make up for it somehow. And then we aim to identify problems and do our best to fix them so that we decrease the chance of them happening again.
Thanks again for your post Gerhard and thanks for your comment ‘The Fly’
Gian Visser
CEO, Afrihost.com
Well done for putting your money where your mouth is , Gian. Certainly refreshing in these times when large companies dont give a damn about their clients, ala telkom.
We as clients in this country, have been on the bad end of bad service for so long that it seems normal. Well done!
Thank you Gian for explaining everything.
My pleasure!
Stumbled upon this entry… I wanna put my 2c worth in!
I’ve been into the Afrihost offices many times & I know the team, damn they put in a lot of effort to keep their clients happy. If you’re ever in Rivonia I suggest you pop in and meet them yourselves. That’ll make you a loyal client for life…
Thanks for the info Peter, I will sure keep that in mind whenever I’m in Johburg again. Would be cool to see their setup.
Yeah right and what do you have to say about the service right now, I phoned them and ask to speak to Gian, and he was not in the office the last two days when they had a problem with Seacom
Hi Izak, I think the problem is not with Afrihost but rather with SEACOM. However that does not make it right in my eyes, all ISPs and not just Afrihost should have backup in place to allow redundancy in the case when SEACOM goes down.
I have seen Gian tweet yesterday about Afrihost offering its clients a proxy to make use of for the duration of the SEACOM downtime, something MWEB does not give its customers. Read here for more information about making use of the proxy http://www.afrihost.co.za/status.php
Hi Gerard, you are absolutely right it’s Seacom, but then I don’t have an agreement with Seacom, but with Afrihost, and I phoned Afrihost and I was told by the Service department that Gian is out of the office. So trying to get hold of Gian is impossible.
I don’t pay Afrihost for a proxy server that is unsafe as well, if you want to do internet banking etc.!
Not once was I offered any positive information when I phoned Afrihost, actually after speaking to the service department I was told that I am getting the service I should be getting…I am sorry but what kind of attitude it that, maybe we are getting the service we are paying for cheat price = cheap service. After speaking to customer services and e-mailing them I ended up canceling my agreement with Afrihost and I would rater pay more at Telkom but have the service that I pay for.
If something like this would happen in America then the service provider will offer the clients better value or support, but then again we are in South African and it’s always easy blaming someone else..