ICASA consumer rules and keeping complaint records
The ICASA consumer protection regulations a South African communications provider works under, and how the Telecom pack keeps a record of each complaint.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Telecoms businesses in South Africa
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Every provider gets complaints. A line that has been down since Tuesday, a contract a customer says they cancelled, a ported number that never arrived, a subscriber who cannot use the self-service portal with a screen reader. Most are resolved in a call or two. A few escalate, and when they do, the question is no longer only whether the customer was right, but whether the provider can show what it did, when, and under which rules.
In South Africa, those rules come largely from ICASA's consumer protection regulations. This article lists the instruments a communications provider should know, explains where ICASA's Complaints and Compliance Committee fits, and shows how the Telecom pack in Achekam's Industry CRM add-on turns each complaint into a ticket with a visible trail.
Where the rules come from
ICASA says it licenses broadcasting, electronic communications and postal services under the ICASA Act and the Electronic Communications Act. Alongside the licences sit regulations that govern how licensees treat consumers. ICASA keeps them together on its consumer protection regulations page, which is the place to find the current text of each one and its amendments.
The End-User and Subscriber Service Charter
The instrument most providers meet first is the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Regulations. ICASA lists them as published in April 2016 in Gazette 39898, amended in 2018 in Gazette 41613, and amended again by the Fourth Amendment Regulations 2023, published on 30 March 2023 in Gazette 48318.
The amendment history is the practical point. Charter obligations have changed more than once, so a complaints procedure written against the 2016 text may be out of date. Read the regulations as amended, and check them for what they say about how complaints are received, how quickly they must be handled, and the information you must give subscribers. Then compare your own procedure with each requirement, one line at a time.
The other consumer instruments
ICASA's existing consumer protection instruments also include the three below. Their titles say what they are about; the detail is in the text of each.
- The Mobile Number Portability Regulations, 2005, on customers moving their mobile numbers between networks.
- The Code for Persons with Disabilities Regulations, 2021, on serving customers with disabilities.
- The Code of Conduct for electronic communications and electronic communications network services licences, 2007, on the conduct expected of licensees.
Not every instrument applies to every provider in the same way: a fixed-line ISP has little to do with mobile number portability, while a mobile reseller deals with it daily. Work out which apply to your licence and services, and keep a short register of them with the date you last checked each for amendments.
How the Complaints and Compliance Committee fits in
ICASA's existing instruments include Regulations governing aspects of the Complaints and Compliance Committee, made in 2012 and amended by the 2022 Amendment Regulations governing aspects of the procedures of ICASA's CCC. The committee is ICASA's own body for complaints and compliance matters, and those regulations govern parts of how it works.
For a provider, the lesson is simple: a complaint that is not resolved in-house may end up being looked at by someone outside the business, against the regulations above. When that happens, a clear record of each step you took is worth more than any account reconstructed from memory and scattered e-mails.
Turning a complaint into a ticket
The Telecommunications pack in Achekam's Industry CRM is built for internet, voice and mobile providers and resellers. It keeps Service subscriptions, support Tickets, and Installation jobs with the equipment installed, so a complaint can sit on the same record as the service it is about.
Each support ticket follows the same path. The pack acknowledges the ticket, runs first-line checks, and escalates by tier against an SLA due date set on the ticket. That gives a complaint three things a regulator or an ombud is likely to ask about: when it was received and acknowledged, what was checked first, and when and to whom it was escalated.
Set the SLA due date on each complaint ticket from your own procedure, which in turn should reflect what the charter regulations require. If the regulations set a time for resolving a type of complaint, the ticket's due date is where that time becomes visible to the people doing the work.
One limit to be clear about: the pack provisions nothing on a network and is connected to no network. If a complaint is about a fault, the technical diagnosis happens in your network tools, and staff record the status and findings on the ticket.
Subtasks that show what was done
Complaints rarely have one step. A billing dispute may need a credit raised, a call back to the customer, a check with the upstream provider and a written answer. In the Industry CRM, tasks can have subtasks up to three levels deep, and a workflow creates its tasks stage by stage, so each piece of follow-up has an owner and a date.
The home-page counts help a manager see trouble early. They come from records, tasks or the ledger and are never typed in by hand, and they include overdue tasks and tasks due today, so a complaint that is slipping shows up on the dashboard rather than in a customer's second complaint.
A complete complaint file, read from the ticket and its subtasks, should answer:
- When was the complaint received, and how?
- When was it acknowledged?
- What first-line checks were made, and what did they find?
- When was it escalated, and to whom?
- What did the business decide, and when was the customer told?
Support tickets with SLA due dates covers the ticket workflow in more depth, and new connections and RICA deals with the documents gathered when a service starts.
A first step
Download the charter regulations and their amendments from ICASA's page, list each requirement that touches complaints, and set your ticket due dates and escalation tiers to match. Review the list whenever ICASA publishes an amendment.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
