Vodafone Customer Service

Vodafone frustrates me. Some of the time they give great customer service – especially if you engage with their Twitter people who several times have sorted problems out for me within minutes.

But at other times the customer service is sub-standard.

In January I moved apartments. As part of that I gave both Telecom and Vodafone advance notice. Telecom scheduled the phone number to transfer for a specific hour on a particular day.

I was hoping Vodafone could arrange for my DSL connection to transfer the same afternoon as the phone transfers. But alas I was told they could not even log my job into their system until the Telecom transfer was done!

Then once the job was logged I was told there would be a 10 to 15 working day delay until my DSL connection was transferred.  In the end it took 16 days (including weekends) to get my DSL working again.

Now this wasn’t the end of the world as I had a vodem, and could survive on mobile broadband even though it is not as fast. So I got through the 16 days okay.

But then I got the bill for the vodem. And on top of the normal $50 monthly charge was $602 of excess data charges!

As I only used the vodem because my DSL connection was not available (which I was paying for incidentally) I e-mailed Vodafone on the 7th of March asking them to consider remitting the excessive usage charges as it was their own inability to reconnect my DSL within a couple of days, which caused the excess data charge.

I go an auto-reply which said:

We appreciate that you have taken the time to write and you can be assured that we will be in touch as soon as possible.

And apart from a further acknowledgement, I’ve never heard back.

The $600 I got whacked is reason enough to be less than happy. But that is not even the biggest issue for me. If I had got a reply saying this is our decision, then I would at least have a decision on which I can base my future purchasing decisions.

But just getting no reply at all is incredibly frustrating. I don’t have the time to spend hours on the phone being transferred from person to person while trying to find out what has happened. I expect a major company to have a system which ensures customers’ letters are replied to – especially those seeking a refund.

UPDATE: Vodafone have contacted me and the issue has been resolved satisfactorily. My thanks to them for this. I use Vodafone for my mobile phone calls and texts, plus as my home ISP, and also as data for my Blackberry, ipad and Vodem. Most months they get $300 to $500 from me, which is fine – but I did object to an extra $600 in the conditions outlined.