Customer complaints surge during pandemic, Globe says

GLOBE Telecom, Inc. has seen a spike in complaints amid the surge in demand for internet services during the coronavirus pandemic, a company official said.

“Definitely, compared to pre-pandemic, there was a surge in complaints because there were heightened expectations from customers,” Globe Vice-President and Head of Broadband Business Darius Jose Delgado said at an online briefing on Tuesday.

“They cannot live without the Internet a single moment, a single second, or a single day. That’s expected, and I think it happened across the industry. But now we are better in managing them because we have reinforced our channels,” he added.

The company has “reinforced” its Globe at Home app to take care of the complaints. “We have also improved our technician resourcing, so we have increased like 80%,” Mr. Delgado noted.

During the pandemic, home internet became the lifeblood of every household, according to Globe.

Globe’s home WiFi prepaid product registered 3.6x growth in total data traffic as of end-March versus the previous year from 58 petabytes to 211 petabytes.

“We heavily distributed and made available our home prepaid WiFi across all of our channels. It’s a do-it-yourself… product, and we made sure we had enough stocks to address the surge in demand,” Mr. Delgado said.

“At only P999, a household belonging to the lower socioeconomic class can now have an internet access,” he added. — Arjay L. Balinbin