Where the customer doesn’t come first

Consumers in Pakistan have few rights, if any. And those codified in law are hardly implemented by service providers.

Take the case of the telecom industry where the state-run regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, seems more concerned with censoring content and what goes on social media than with carrying out its primary responsibility which is to protect the rights of users andregulate the quality of service of internet service providers and mobile phone companies.

If anything, over the years the PTA has become the arbiter of public morality, censoring content on the internet as it sees fit. It is also the executing agency implementing the government’s ongoing action to block Twitter/X. In this regard, its performance before the Sindh High Court has been shambolic. In a hearing before the Sindh High Court on Sept 16, the regulator was confused over whether the prohibition on Twitter/X should remain or be reversed – so much so that the court expressed considerable displeasure at the deputy attorney general who was representing the federal government and PTA.

Moving on to banking: in the past couple of years, profits by banks have ballooned, and several banks have made after-tax profits of billions every quarter. However, at most banks in Pakistan the customer experience has usually been less than satisfactory.

While banks make a lot of money, and most of it comes from the spread (the difference in the interest rate that they charge on loans that they give out and the interest rate paid to their account-holders) and hence is financed mostly by their customers, they don’t invest much in improving the quality of the customer experience.

Anyone who has been to a bank in recent years, even to do something as simple as making a cash or cheque deposit/withdrawal, will have experienced long delays, unused teller booths, people not on their seats and so on. Even if they are able to avoid having to make a physical visit to the bank and deal with their personal banking issues online or through the phone, they have often had to deal with large opaque bureaucracies or incompetent and uninformed helpline staff. In most cases, there is usually no recourse to such experiences, unless of course one happens to know someone important at the said bank.

Then there are your phone companies and the less said the better there. Their pricing and taxing of various plans on offer is confusing and not transparent and phone subscribers often end up thinking that what they ended up paying in their mobile phone bill or for data was not what they were told when they purchased a plan. But, as with customer experiences in almost all other industries, it is far from satisfactory and one is usually left feeling as if one has been taken for a ride by the company in question.

One has also heard of instances where subscribers have had to fight literally for months to get a service closed – the oldest and largest telecom provider is notorious in this regard and getting a landline shuttered from it can take several months (after repeated reminders and after the company sending you repeated bills with new charges) just to get something as simple as that achieved (I am speaking, of course, from personal experience).

Banks make billions in profits every year yet they can’t spend even a small fraction of those profits on training their staff to provide better customer experience to their account-holders and by significantly increasing the number of staff who act as tellers and in other roles where they need to interact with customers.

In the government sector, the situation is even worse. Take for example what a sizable proportion of residents of Karachi get in return for the charges they pay every year for water – literally nothing, even though they pay bills sent to them by the Karachi Water and Sewerage Corporation or the Cantonment Board Clifton (CBC). Despite this, they are not provided water through the piped network – and instead have to spend thousands of rupees every month to pay for water tankers.

The obvious question is: how come there is enough water to provide these residents through tankers but not enough to supply it to the same homes through piped water lines? At a recent hearing by the Sindh High Court on this matter, the lawyer for the CBC was asked this very question by the judge and instead of giving a straightforward answer he sought two weeks from the court to furnish a reply.

It’s not all doom and gloom everywhere though. There are some oases of shining examples that are getting it right for the benefit of citizens and consumers. An example is the driving licence branch of the Sindh police in Karachi’s Clifton area where licence renewal or even a new licence can be obtained without much hassle and without having to use an agent or a connection in the police.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com