Can du really do this?
Posted on 20 June 2011 with 3 comments from readers
An unwelome phone call out-of-the-blue from the UAE’s telecom duopolist du is informing customers for its broadband packages that the contractual payment terms are being changed with no ‘grace period’ for payments at all.
If the customer is a day or so late paying up, or if the automatic payment system is cut off due to the blocking of a credit card, extra charges will be made. Can this sort of change to a signed contract be legal, even if the customer is called with notification?
UAE culture
It is certainly a sneaky and underhand business practice, and not in keeping with the culture and tradition of fair play in the UAE. It is also not good business.
For what sort of name does this give du? It will only add to the lines of disatisfied customers that you will always find queuing up in du service centres across the country, and cause even more nasty rows at the counter. If you want to find social unrest in the UAE this is the only place you will find it.
Something always seems to be going wrong at du, despite the many irritating attempts to survey customers. There is no point in having these if you cannot follow through.
The staff are not properly trained and so more mistakes often seem to follow to compound the original error. Say your automatic payments are cancelled due to a credit card blockage. It can take several visits to du to get it back working thanks to staff errors.
Rapid growth
Now on the other hand you can excuse du as one of the most rapidly growing companies in the UAE. It is investing heavily in infrastructure and broadband speeds are up while prices are down, though still way above European levels.
ArabianMoney certainly welcomed the price cuts for broadband last year (click here) but it is still too expensive.
Perhaps this is the price of success. However, good management practice costs nothing, delivers better service to customers and can only enhance profits and the brand. Surely this is what du should do, and abandon its latest sneaky ploy to catch out customers.
3 Comments posted by readers:
DU are a disgrace!
I am a customer by force as they are the only broadband provider where I live (guess where?)
I have cancelled my showtime due to the repeated incompetence on supplying upgraded box and package – 10 long, repeated, protracted “customer service” calls to ask, beg, plead with them to supply me with what I HAVE BEEN PAYING for for 6 months!!!
In the end I took the box into their offices – cancelled it – got a refund for 6 months!!
Not a question on why are you cancelling sir, please don’t, so sorry – nothing!!!
I would be very worried about a company that spends so much money trying to win new customers – but lets existing customers disconnect without a question.
I would disconnect the lot if i had an alternative.
If i owned shares in DU i would be very nervous….
We received the following response to this article from du:
‘du is informing customers for its broadband packages that the contractual payment terms are being changed with no ‘grace period’ for payments at all.’
Further to the above-noted statement, we would like to point out that this is factually incorrect. Please find below the correct background for clarification:
We offer a 30 day (a month) grace period to our customers to pay their broadband bills. In the past, we used to allow the customer an additional 10 days beyond the due date of the bill, which is 30 days after the bill has been issued, amounting to a total of 40 days (considering a month of 30 days) from the date of billing, in which the customer was able to make their payment. This was practiced when our payment channels were limited to our shops and online.
Today, we have established an extensive network of additional channels, which include: 10 banks (Emirates NBD, First Gulf Bank, Emirates Islamic Bank, Mashreq, Commercial Bank of Dubai, Union National Bank, Citibank, RAK Bank, Dubai Bank and Al Hilal Bank), 7 financial companies and exchange houses (Dunia Finance, Al Fardan, Al Ansari, Al Ghurair Exchange, Al Razouki International, LM Exchange and Redha Al Ansari), as well as through the retail network of some of our partners such as Axiom, One mobile, fono and Emirates Post.
Hence, we felt it is reasonable and fair to revert back to the standard practice of bill settlement which is normally on or before the due date of the bill (i.e. within the course of the following month after the date of the bill).
It is worth adding that the connection process is fully automated. Once the outstanding amount is paid through any of our payment channels, the line will be reconnected within a few hours. Note that over 92% of payment requests are processed and the lines are reconnected within one hour.
We would like to request you to publish this rectification as the story which appeared yesterday on Arabian Business created a lot of confusion amongst our clients. In the future, we would appreciate contacting me or our PR agency (MS&L) and enabling us to comment before publishing the story so that you have a 360 degree view of the story. Our doors are always open to all media queries.
Ed Note: All changes to written and signed contracts should be notified in writing and not by phone or text messages. As for the confusion over the 30-day grace period we do not recall this explanation being made in the phone call to our office.
We were told that the broadband packages are such great value that du felt unable to continue with the grace period, and that was it. Perhaps the intention was honorable but the execution was flawed and misleading.
This is the problem with phone calls: you have no written record of what was said, and that is why they cannot be used to alter a legal contract.
The onus is on du to correctly communicate its terms and conditions to customers – and to expect us to ring their media office to check that their own staff are making the correct statements is frankly ridiculous.
Also this is ArabianMoney.Net and NOT Arabian Business – we do not confuse du with Etisalat!
Du is TERRIBLE
but you have no choice