NCC Resolves More Than 25,000 Complaints In 15 Months

A report by the Nigerian Communications Commission says the industry regulators received at least 26,169 complaints from telecoms consumers, 98 per cent of which were successfully resolved.

The service-related complaints were received from telecoms consumers within a 15-month period, spanning January 2019 to April 2020, according to the report released on July 14, 2020 by Ikechukwu Adinde, NCC’s director of public affairs.

In the 15-month period when the 26,169 complaints were received and managed by the Commission, 25,575, representing 98 per cent of the total complaints were expeditiously resolved.

Many of the satisfied consumers reverted to either acknowledge the prompt resolution of their complaints or to thank the Commission for its intervention in service-related issues between them and their respective service providers.

The complaints were received through all the Commission’s official channels of communication.

These include 24,481 complaints received through Commission’s Contact Centres; 1,007 complaints received through the NCC Consumer Portal; and 296 others received as written complaints submitted at NCC Head Office in Abuja and at the Commission’s five zonal offices in Lagos, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kano and Ibadan.

Complaints also reached the Commission through its official email (ncc@ncc.gov.ng) while 366 of the complaints were transmitted to the Commission through its social media handles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the specially-dedicated Twitter handle for consumer issues (@ConsumersNCC).

Also 19 complaints were also referred to the Commission during the period through the Twitter account of Honourable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami.

According to the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of NCC, Prof, Umar Danbatta, “the Commission is pleased to find that consumers are increasingly accessing the numerous complaint channels instituted by the Commission to resolve second level complaints brought to its attention.”

“It is important to note that Commission’s actions in this regard is in congruence with NCC’s mandate to protect and defend the rights of the consumer, and to give concrete expression to its faith in the consumer as the lifeblood of the telecom sector, and therefore deserving of priority attention as enshrined in the Nigerian Communications Act (NCA) 2003,” Danbatta said.

Danbatta assured consumers of NCC’s readiness to sustain existing measures put in place to sustain improvement in QoS, in order to reduce incidents of complaints and to ensure the overall protection of the rights of the telecom consumer.

“Such measures include monthly engagement sessions with operators on QoS; quarterly QoS Industry Working Group (IWG) meetings on QoS; continuous engagement with the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) on Right of Way (RoW) issue; regular publication of QoS performance data on the Commission’s website; instituting benchmarking drive test across the country to measure performance of each operator; establishing new QoS measurement mechanisms for assessing operators’ performance across all states of the Federation, among others,” Danbatta emphasised.

He said, “Telecom consumers should continue to report challenges about quality of service, first with their service providers, and if not satisfied with the handling of the complaints by service providers, the consumer may then escalate the matter to the Commission through various channels provided as mentioned above.”