iTxt a bad MXit clone going nowhere slowly

At the end of 2006 I was contacted about a new mobile message company iTXT, that claimed to launch safer chat rooms on cellphones. This was at the height of MXit’s initial negative publicity. I investigated the company and signed up on my cellphone to evaluate the service.

I immediately found some usability problems and reported this to the PR company, who contacted me. The model was flawed to begin with because of a small weekly fee. The MXit business model was always no monthly or weekly fees because everything is pre-paid via Moola, and therefor on a pay-per use bases. A monthly fee for ringtones or access to a chatroom is like those irritating debit orders for insurance policies on your bank account.

Anyway, I have since removed the iTXT application from my cellphone, but like clockwork I get the monthly SMS: “iTxt Monthly Reminder- Have you tried iTxt on your PC? www.itxt.co.za“

And so every other month I diligently go their website, email them a request to remove my account and stop sending these SMS messages to no avail. Now, if they only had a landline or at least a cellphone, I could call someone to resolve my dilemma.

So just a word of caution. If you come across a website, especially an ecommerce website just take a moment to check if they have a landline or, at the very least, a cellphone number. If their contact page looks like this one below…run! Avoid them because they are not making it easy for you, a potential client, to engage with them. This was one of the earliest criticisms I had of MXit i.e. no telephone number on their website. And it’s maybe no surprisethat they also do not have any telephone number listed on their website. So I if you have any customer support issues with MXit call them on 0861 00 6948.

Let me know if you have had any hiccups in having your user accounts removed from a website or cellphone wireless application service provider in South Africa.