GT shares time with customers

Accra, July 13, GNA - Ghana Telecom (GT) has installed a fraud management system that would help to detect fraud in its billing system. At a day's interaction with its customers dubbed:"Time with GT", Mr Emmanuel Dziko, General Manager, Strategy and Development, said complaints of ghost numbers and multiple ownership of numbers would be a thing of the past if the fraud management system became operational. He said a billing mediation system had also been installed where customers could get their bills with a touch of a button on any day and at any time when the customer so desired.

Mr Dziko said one of the major problems confronting the organisation was the issue of middlemen and therefore urged customers to be wary of middlemen who extorted huge sums of money from them with the promise to provide them with telephone services. "We do not charge more than 800,000 cedis for the installation of a telephone line, neither do we charge customers for poles," he said, adding that customers only paid token fees for poles with the organisation absorbing the bulk as part of its customer service.

The Ghana National Fire Service appealed to GT to help track down people who called emergency numbers to raise false fire alarms, since their activities were leading to a drain on government resources. A customer alleged that a number he had never called appeared 145 times on his bills for a particular month and appeared again the subsequent month leading to his bill soaring into millions of cedis. Mr Dziko said his outfit had had several of such complaints in the past and upon thorough investigations the culprits were often found to belong to the complainant's household. He, however, promised to investigate this particular case.

Some customers complained of frequent disconnection of their lines when they had not received their bills. Others also talked about regular breakdown of public pay phones and urged GT to maintain them at regular intervals. Mr. Dziko apologised to customers who were at one time or the other victims of unsatisfactory services, including billing, attitude of fault clearance staff, among others and said GT now had a new image and was in a position to serve them.