We’re Dedicated to your experience
Boots on the ground
You don’t have to look very hard to see a branded Evotel van when in Rustenburg North, West and surrounding areas, these branded vehicles are constantly scurrying around solving problems and ensuring the Evotel network is sable and uncompromised.
When speaking to the supervisor of a team of maintenance technicians, Robert Mushakwe. We were informed that they need to be visible around their area of operation, as it’s their mission to rapidly respond to outages within minutes. This is so clients can experience minimal down time.
The Evotel marketing team was fortunate enough to bear witnessed to the operation in action. An outage query came in from our head office in Johannesburg, and the team sprang into action, jumping into their cars racing to save the situation to ensure clients are not without an internet connection for long. These staff members live by this is the golden rule, the client time is a precious commodity, that needs protecting.
Interviewing Mushakwe
“It’s our priority to have our clients happy at all times,” said Mushakwe who has a great working relationship with his team of colleagues, made up of local community members, including; Kidman Miba, Fortune Mokhethi, Martha Mboweni, Obakeng Molefe and Ipeleng Moeketsi.
“Working for Evotel is a worthy exercise where you learn a lot of new skills, and gain exposure to greater opportunities,” said Mushakwe.
“We meet different people, different races, different classes and different characters, allowing us to learn as we face many different circumstances and challenges and learn from them. Most importantly, we get work experience and skills in fibre optic network maintenance, and infrastructure. Skills that will benefit my team for the entirety of their working lives. We see this work as an opportunity to get exposure on preventive maintenance, installation, and issue resolution.
“To us, it shouldn’t take an hour to respond to outages. In fact, within that time we should have been able to restore connection, otherwise there had better be a solid reason why it took longer. When we get an outage, we investigate the issue, report to our head office so they can report to clients and then complete the repairs as quickly as possible without compromising on quality. Our entire team shares the same vision as Evotel, and we work as a collective for one common goal. The civil guys goes first then followed by maintenance and quality control within quick succession.”
Fun after the work is done.
We have regular team building exercises when they are off duty. Starting an Evotel soccer team, which plays against other company teams around Rustenburg, allowing us to engage with community members on a personal level, allowing us to understand their challenges and frustrations. We believe that this gives us a key advantage over other FNO’s (Fibre Network Operators) we believe that this decision allows us to better serve our communities and understand each community that we are working within.
Currently we have two teams, one from installation and one from maintenance. We hope to one day have our teams to be registered to play against masters, but for now friendlies soccer games are keeping the staff unified and motivated” Mushakwe added.
Cruising across busy streets of townships and suburbs across Rustenburg, the keen eye would spot the black plastic boxes on pavements. If you spot one of these boxes please treat them with respect and cautions as these boxes carry our fibre infrastructure and damage to them could cause an outage. Many now rely on the education, opportunities and cost savings that these boxes represent and communities are increasingly becoming protective over their network infrastructure in a country where service delivery is not always a given.
Blow the whistle
Our largest challenges are with private contractors who destroy or vandalize our infrastructure in order to attempt to gain a competitive advantage. This unfortunately is at the expense of the community members. Occasionally issues are caused by municipal digging, or even accidentally by gardeners and workers that are not aware of the infrastructure.
We hope that better awareness of our network will inspire our communities to take good care of the it and inform us of any vandalism or visible damages that they notice so our teams can be better informed and resolve issues in the fastest resolution times possible. Our dream is to provide world class service to all our communities so we can keep them online and enjoying fast affordable fibre internet.
