Wananchi Group’s Zuku has never been viewed positively in the past few years. The company, one of the first to offer fixed home internet, has been experiencing difficulties and it appears that it is unable to address its technical issues based on social media complaints and overall customer dissatisfaction with its product.
Just two weeks ago, the company’s services experienced an outage for an entire weekend. To make matters worse, the company made no efforts to address customer complaints, further frustrating them as it seemed that Zuku did not care about their issues.
Although Zuku did provide an explanation later, it came at a time when people were already angry. It also reached a point where some people made complaints to the ICT regulator, the CA, to investigate the matter and compel the company to issue credits equivalent to usage during an outage or compensate customers for each day or time that a service is unavailable.
And that’s not all: Zuku customers are frequent complainers on social media channels and a day does not pass without hearing reports of service downtime in some areas. Unfortunately, these customers have few options because, as with fixed internet operators, they serve areas where they have a monopoly. In rare cases, you can find both Zuku and Safaricom Home Fibre serving the same area, such as sections of Waiyaki Way.
To this end, Zuku has reported it would like to credit its customers for service outages.
“As we continue with the stabilization efforts, we would also like to assure our esteemed customers that Zuku Fibre will endeavour to offer credit for service outages to customers in the affected areas, as we have always done, and as has been communicated and continues to be communicated to customers individually,” says Zuku in a statement.
Unless the company improves its service in a timely manner, there will be few people who will recommend its service due to the frequent downtimes. There have been cases where people have moved just to use rival companies that provide more consistent services.
Zuku has since been overtaken by Safaricom Home Fibre, which continues to expand its service to other parts of the country beyond Kenya’s cities. In Q1 2022/2023, Safaricom had more than 350,000 subscriptions compared to Zuku’s 251,000 subscriptions, giving them market shares of 35.6% and 25.5% respectively
