MTN Ghana Chief Executive, Michael Ikpoki says MTN now has over 9.9 million subscriptions and was poised to reach 10 million subscriptions sometime this month. Speaking at the launch of MTN Ghana Customer Care Week, Mr. Ikpoki noted that because of the “excellent customer service and professionalism of MTN staff”, more people continued to join MTN in spite of the growing stiff competition in the telecoms market in Ghana. “Currently we have more than 9.9 million customers, which is more than 40% of Ghana’s population – sometime this month we will reach 10 million customers – I don’t know exactly when but it will definitely happen this month,” he said. He noted that the MTN customer service week was under the theme “Enriching lives – connecting with our customer”, and was being used to reward selected loyal prepaid and postpaid customers, celebrate excellent team players at MTN, donate to New Horizon School, hold a debate, and also undertake a number of customer-centric activities across country just to say “thank you to MTN customers”. Mr. Ikpoki said the theme reflected the impact MTN had been making on the lives of customers in terms of enriching lives by providing jobs, facilitating social and business network, helping customer to connect with their dreams and aspirations, facilitating entrepreneurship, and business growth among other things. “We said we want to connect with our customers, and we do that by getting more feedback from our customers, engaging our customers more, involving them more in how we do things at MTN so they can tell us what products and services are relevant to them,” he said. He said MTN has shown commitment to customer satisfaction through two fundamental ways, investment and providing easiest access to customer service. Mr. Ikppoki said MTN has been aggressive with investments in the its network and “we are confident that today by all standards we have the best network quality, best voice signals, best voice quality, the fast 3G coverage, we give the best value and of course we have widest coverage in Ghana right now.” He said MTN could not have achieved all that without investing in the network and so moving forward MTN would continue to invest in its network. The MTN Ghana CEO said in terms of easy access to customer service, MTN rolled out seven new service centres this year, and the target was to increase the customer service centres to 65 by the close of the year and also to upgrade existing ones to make it more welcoming and to deliver data and other service more efficiently. Mr. Ikpoki said at MTN, customer service was not just the duty of a particular department but a way of life for every section and staff of the company. “As we go forward to 2012 we will be drumming it home to every worker at MTN that everyone, whether you belong to corporate service, finance, network group, marketing or whatever section, you are here to do one and only one thing – that is to serve the customer,” he said. Mr. Ikpoki said MTN was working towards raising the bar in customer service in the telecom industry by transforming its customer service into customer delight, where the customers would look forward to interacting with MTN staff because they know they would be delighted doing so. He said as part of the week’s celebration, there would be a staff education on customer serviced to reorient every staff of MTN on how to respect their customer the more and how to support customers to realise their goals and aspirations through “service with a smile”. Mr. Ikpoki thanked MTN customers for believing in MTN and promised that MTN would raise the customer care bar higher to provide customer delight of a quality that beats standard not only on the local market, but also on the global market. Senior Manager, Quality Assurance at Customer Care, Lawrence Ackosen took the opportunity in an interview with Adom News MTN to caution customers against scams in which cusotmers are usually required to send some text message or pay some money for a reward on MTN. "We want our customers to know that we do not ask customers to pay any money to claim their prizes in any of our promotions, and until you get a call from 0244300000, whichever number calls you or sends you a text message for any promotion on MTN is a scam," he said. An MTN staff representative read out a customer service pledge, in which she promised on behalf of her colleagues that MTN staff would continue to renew their relationship with customers in ways that gave customers delightful experience.