I would like to start off this letter with congratulations to Batelco over the massive improvements they have made in speed for both Home and Business Broadband connections. As a loyal customer of Batelco, who has been with the company for over 25 years, I can attest to the great leaps Batelco has made in terms of both affordability and quality. That’s not to say, however, that there is no room for improvement. One area that is in sore need of attention is Customer Service.
For the past several months, an item has been appearing on my bill named “Additional E-mail Charges”. The cost of this item is a whopping BD 12.500 a month!! To put this in perspective, for one of the months in question, my actual calling charges were only between 100-200 fils. The rest of the bill was the fixed line rental, the internet rental and the Additional E-mail Charges. In order to find out exactly what these charges were, I decided to call the Batelco helpline on 196. The executive I spoke with told me that this particular Additional E-mail Charge did not appear in my bill on his system. He also told me that since I only had the original free email address assigned to me by Batelco when I first took the internet connection, this charge on my bill made no sense. He asked me to visit the Batelco Building in Manama and speak to the executives there face to face and register a complaint. This is where all the trouble began. The executives at the Batelco Building told me to register a complaint over the phone. The person I spoke with on the phone then asked me to register my complaint personally. And so on and so forth. When I was finally able to register a complaint (on the phone), the lady I spoke with assured me that I would receive a complaint reference number on my cell phone in 5 minutes. That was over a month ago. I am still waiting for that message to arrive.
I am not as young or