Supported Anton Brathwaite
My father’s LIME telephone has been out of order for the past 36 hours due to a technical fault at LIME. All telephones carried on fibre optic were out of order when the fault first started but some have been restored. I called at 10 pm Barbados time on Wednesday to report the fault to LIME Call Center but was frustrated by the responses which I got from the persons answering the phone at 1-800-804-2994. Obviously English is not the first language of the country where the call center was located at that time. I asked one of the technical assistants if he was aware of problems on the fibre optic network since my father recently had his phone switched from the old copper cable landline to fibre optic cable. Lord Have His Mercy, it was like asking him a nuclear physics question.
After several meaningless rantings, he told me that he would get a technician from Barbados to visit my father’s home. I told him that I was reporting a fault on the fibre optic cable and not the old copper cable and furthermore the LIME TV and Internet which shared services with the telephone on the fibre optic cable, were up and running so it was not necessary for anyone to visit his home. I am not technically trained but common sense told me that by a process of elimination, there was/is nothing wrong with the cable to my father’s home nor the Galaxy modem but it all had to do with LIME in-house. This was later confirmed by a Jamaican LIME technical assistant when the Call Center was switched for daytime control from wherever it was during the night to Jamaica.
LIME, an acronym for ‘Landline, Internet, Mobile, Entertainment’, is a communications provider owned by the British based Cable & Wireless Communications PLC operating in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines and Turks & Caicos in the Caribbean. It also has 49% shares of the Trinidad and Tobago Telecommunications company. .[1]
My questions for LIME are:
(1) Why should Caribbean people be reporting faults to a call center where the staff do not speak English as the first language?
(2) Why should Caribbean people who pay much more for communications than other countries be subjected to this inferior service when reporting a fault to LIME CALL Center?
(3) Why has it taken LIME almost two days to fix an in-house problem?
(4) Why has there not been an announcement on radio or tv informing subscribers who have a fibre optic installation, of the nature of the fault and the expected time of restoration?
(5) Does the Company still have a Public Relations Manager?
I hope that the Governments of the Caribbean would one day insist that LIME locate the Call Center 24/7 in one of the Caribbean countries in which they operate.
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