Saturday, November 9, 2019

PLUS's press statement shows they are out of touch with their customers

PLUS largely operates along the North-South Highway and also the urban areas where its highway passes through Damansara right down to Klang (NKVE) while its Elite Highway passes through part of Shah Alam and connects to KLIA/KLIA2 from Damansara. PLUS obviously has the best highway in the country besides LDP in the urban areas.

Recently, it came out with a practice by not allowing motorists to do their top-up through its booths but instead pushing the motorists to top up counters at various counters at the side of the highways. I am not against the move as it does smoothen the traffic as queues do create unnecessary traffic along the toll booths. However on the other hand, practices like this creates complains from the toll users as some of them could not use the convenience of the booths for top ups, whereas they have to stop at stops to do the top ups.

The CEO of PLUS, came out and defended the company's move as it claims that motorists, due to this practice, top-up a higher amount each time whenever on average. It sounds as the right thing to do. However, if we try to understand the reason for some of them to do micro top-ups of RM10 and RM20, we can see and understand the financial situation of these people. A lot of these guys are also Grab or e-hailing drivers. In a few instances, the Grab drivers even asked me for cash to top up their pre-paid cards.

I think in many cases nobody wants to do micro top-ups if they can afford to but they just do not want their money to be tied down to the cards. That's what it is, in general.

Hope that a large company like PLUS can be more empathetic.

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