Why consumers are important to telecoms industry – Danbatta

Fri, Mar 20, 2020
By publisher
2 MIN READ

Business Briefs

PROF. Umar Danbatta, executive vice-chairman, Nigerian Commissions Commission, NCC, has described telecom consumers as the central factor in the commission’s regulatory activities. He said the NCC would continue to advance the course of protecting telecoms consumers from unwholesome practices by the service providers.

Danbatta, who spoke in Abuja during the recent celebration of the World Consumer Rights Day, said the commission would continue to ride on its tripartite principle of fairness, firmness, and forthrightness. He said the commission celebrates the telecom consumer every day of the year, and it is a self-evident truth that consumer is the lifeblood of the sector.

According to him, the efforts will be sustained in line with the theme of this year’s celebration: ‘The Sustainable Consumer.’ “In keeping with its commitment to the tradition of celebrating the telecom consumer, the NCC is reiterating its commitment to safeguarding the interest and ensuring the satisfaction of the consumer as the central factor of the telecom ecosystem,” he said.

Danbatta explained that the NCC has strengthened the initiatives to educate and inform consumers just as the Commission declared 2017 as the Year of the Telecom Consumer. “Some of those consumer-centric initiatives, programmes, directions, policies, and regulations, include the Do-Not-Disturb (DND) 2442 Short Code, to which over 24 million subscribers have subscribed to in order to be able to control unsolicited text messages; the Toll-Free Number 622 as a second level mechanism for escalating consumer complaints not satisfactorily resolved by the service providers to the Commission for effective resolutions.

“Over a million complaints have been successfully resolved for the consumers through these channels. We have also put in place regulations to combat e-waste in the country, working in collaboration with other agency to combat the influx of fake and substandard phones in the country, developed guidelines on disaster recovery to ensure consumers do not face the negative impact of network problem on service delivery for long.”

Danbatta said the NCC inaugurated a 26-member multi-sectoral committee to develop modalities for protecting telecoms consumers from being vulnerable to e-frauds, while it has also taken measures to review its Consumer Complaints and Service Level Agreement, CC/SLA, by the operators. According to him, the commission developed the 112 Emergency Communication Number, which can be dialed by a telecoms consumer in an emergency situation to get help from emergency response agencies through the Emergency Communications Centres built by the commission.

  – Mar. 20, 2020 @ 13:49 GMT |

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