UMEME “ate” my Yaka units

On 24^th February 2020, my husband paid for my Yaka and I totally forgot to load it on our meter that night since I still had a few units left. I remembered to load the units 2 days later on the 26^th February 2020, however I was not successful and simply received an error message as can be seen below. 

I tried to re-enter the digits of the token number from the SMS over and over but received the same error message. Now for clarity, I usually load the units for my Yaka meter immediately I do the mobile money payment aside from this one incident so I have never had an issue before.

Living in Uganda and working in the service industry, I understand that once in a while systems do break down but I also expect the people who man them to do their best to ensure that they get things running back to normal as soon as possible. 

So as a reasonable individual that’s exactly what I did and so I asked my husband to call the UMEME help line to follow up on the issue. After multiple calls and very contradictory information he was told that the units expired so there was nothing that could be done aside from repaying.

I decided to step in and went on Twitter for help which meant re sending the details of our entire complaint for a second and even third time because I realized that the UMEME account has different respondents over day and night time shifts which is understandable.  So via Twitter I spoke with 3 digital personnel for UMEME initialed (OE), (BA) and (NB) who did not resolve my issue.

Usually I let such things go but it is because of the manner in which the UMEME help line staff and online (digital media) team did not resolve the issue/ give feedback/ try to buy time in a bid to wear us down that baffled me an already very aggrieved customer. That aside see details in the screen shots below where I was told token remain valid for 3 months.

Now please note that today is 10^th April, Yaka was paid for on 24^th February those are 46 days gone already. Usually my blog provides comic relief but today I intend to get accountability for a service I am owed and for which I need some resolution. A paying customer should not lose 100,000 worth of their hard earned money for no good reason so I will ensure to follow up on this issue.

A part of me is consciously sorry knowing that from this point onward that as a result of my persistence in following up, someone will indeed get in trouble for my relentlessness. However, in these times when every shilling matters, it is important that we go back to the basics and service providers must remember to value every customers’ business even when they are a monopoly.