Zamtel have a poll to get feedback on what users think of their website. “This is different”, I thought to myself as I prepared to vote.
Three options are available to choose from: Excellent, Good and Poor. My mind had already made itself up about the site before I had even seen the poll—poor!
The face of communications for Zambia
The poll has been online since April 2007 and since then almost half the visitors to www.zamtel.zm think the site is poor. What! Zamtel is the face of communications for the entire nation!
If you created a poll wouldn’t you arrange the items on the list in some order of priority. This looks like a multiple-choice list (Special Paper 1 perhaps).
I can’t help but read in to and extrapolate from the result. The Zambia of present is not renowned for its customer service or attention to detail. It is embarrassing but it is true.
Once proud and free
Somewhere along the way we stopped being proud of the things we make. Zamtel is a prime example.
We’d rather import or let someone (foreign) do the work we are fully competent and capable of doing. This is the case in the analogue and digital sense. Our web developers and designers are doing the same thing with website Content Management Systems (CMSs), stock photographs and illustrations. A sampling of major national websites illustrates just this fact. I challenge you to find counter-examples. Yet, we could easily be writing our own CMS themes and generating our own content.
So, what do you think of the Zamtel website?