SEACOM’s consumer-focused, fibre to the home (FTTH) and fibre to the small business offering, WonderNet, launched a new payment system this June to finally give consumers more flexibility when settling their accounts.
The idea behind the new Pay Now feature is to put the user back in control of their accounts and finances. Unlike most other Internet service providers, WonderNet doesn’t force users to pay via debit order. If you choose to, you can now bypass the banks’ debit order processes and pay via whichever method suits you best. These payment methods include SnapScan, Zapper, QRjunction, your credit card, app driven payments, and instant EFT.
The payment system is also fully integrated with WonderNet’s customer profiles. That means the system updates as soon as a user has paid, so there’s no more waiting for payments to clear before they’re reflected. Should you need to pay an outstanding bill or reconnect your account, you will receive an email with a ‘Pay Now’ button on it that will let you make payment right then and there by redirecting you to the feature on your WonderNet account. Five minutes later, you’ll be back online.
“We’re in the business of taking care of our customers and part of that is making sure we keep developing features that make it easier for them to stay connected to the Internet,” explains Matthew Campbell, Head of SME and FTTH at SEACOM. “With more people working from home or running businesses from home, we understand that even 30 minutes without Internet can mean lost productivity. Pay Now is part of our overall focus on making signing up to and staying connected to the Internet as pain free as possible.”
According to Campbell, Pay Now originated after some customers expressed frustration with how long debit order changes took to reflect. This got the team thinking about how to make the payment process in general more flexible and user friendly. Pay Now offers customers the convenience of not having to worry about reconnecting debit orders before the start of the new month – now you can pay instantly, your way.
Customers have responded well to the new payment method, seeing it as an extension of WonderNet’s seamless approach to connecting South Africa to the Internet.
“Pay Now is just one of many ways we want to make life easier and eliminate admin from customers. We believe that, if you want to, you should be able to sign up for fibre entirely online, without having to speak to a call centre agent or sign any annoying paperwork. Through this customer-focused approach, we’ve reduced the average age of help tickets by almost 90%, and decreased the proportion of customers who log tickets. We take the satisfaction of our customers so seriously that we comb through social media posts and customer feedback to inform new features or feature changes.”
