The best way for South Africans abroad to call home: banks, SARS and family
On hold with a South African bank from London, without the bill.
If you live overseas, you already use WhatsApp for family. The calls that cause trouble are the others: the bank's call centre, SARS, the medical aid, the municipality, a parent with a landline, the school. None of them are on WhatsApp, most keep you on hold, and from a foreign SIM every minute of that hold is an international call.
Here are the ways South Africans abroad handle it.
- Call from the foreign SIM. Simple and expensive, especially on hold.
- Ask family at home to phone for you. Often impossible; call centres want to speak to the account holder.
- Use a calling app with credit. You call the South African number directly, over your internet, at a per-second rate.
A cloud number adds one more thing that the others do not: a South African number of your own. With Ukutel, people and companies in South Africa can phone you back on a local number, and it rings in the app wherever you are. When you call them, they see a South African number, which matters more than people expect. Calls from unknown foreign numbers often go unanswered.
Some practical advice from people who do this every month:
- Call centres: phone early in the South African morning, when queues are shortest. Mind the time difference.
- Hold time: per-second billing means you pay for the hold you actually sit through, not rounded-up minutes. It is still worth choosing a quiet time.
- One-time PINs: these go to the number your bank has on record. Ask your bank which options they offer clients abroad before you rely on any second number.
- Airtime: load it in rands. Top-up airtime with us does not expire, so a balance kept for the yearly SARS call is still there next year.