[teclo]

A couple of weeks ago ( 4th of June (https://talk3g.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2605) ) I got so fed up with not being able to get a vodafone mobile signal in my flat that I called them up and spent 45 minutes or so talking to a call centre drone and a manager.

The upshot was that they were going to terminate the contract and send a courier to pick up the phone that week.

Flash forward to now, and no one has come to pick the phone up, concerned that I was still going to be charged for this I have called up Vodafone.

It turns out there was no log of the conversation with the manager or the decision to terminate my contract at no expense to me and that a courier will be sent out.

I feel as though I am being screwed over by Vodafone again. For about 8 months I've had little or no usable signal in my flat so I have been paying for a phone that I could only really use when I was in Glasgow.

Now I am being told that they can't cancel my contract without a transmitter being down. Which totally contradicts what I was told on the 4th.

So I hang up and try again, this time ask to be put through to Network services and then ask for a manager as soon as I get put through.

A couple of minutes later I am put through to a very helpful girl, Kate and she does all the magic.

So now my account is now terminating, she said that the termination is now processing and the sim should be disconnected tonight.

About time too if you ask me.

Thats another hour of my time wasted talking to vodafone CS.

It got quite funny towards the end when I asked her to add some complaints and told her about the dumbass stuff that some of the CS staff had told me. That had her laughing :) and I was calm again.

Honestly you should have heard some of the rubbish that CS comes out with, enough for me to send them back a smashed up N70.....



I am calm.. I am in my happy place... I have tea....

[Ben]

Oh dear :( You'd think Vodafone would at least be slightly concerned that there's an area in Glasgow (!!) that they don't have coverage in.

Properly logging phone conversations is something our UK CS operations don't seem to have gotten to grips with. This was made painfully obvious to me when dealing with Apple customer services who literally log every word you say to your account. It really is shame on Vodafone that they couldn't get this sorted the first time around and that you had to go through the whole drawn out process all over again. At least you found someone willing to help in the end.

So. Where will your mobile needs take you now?

[teclo]

Oh dear :( You'd think Vodafone would at least be slightly concerned that there's an area in Glasgow (!!) that they don't have coverage in.

I live 15 miles or so outside of Glasgow in Dumbarton. A crappy town that no one has heard of, including VF by the sounds of it.

It was funny that I went to Disconnects as my first trundle around the call tree, which I thought would be the obvious place to visit. Apparently not, they can't transfer you any where else. You will love this, to speak to a manager there, you need to put in a request and they may get back to you within 24 hours. I guess this came up because the circular conversation I was having with this CS drone was driving me mad and I gave her 2 minutes to find me a manager.

After that the conversation kind of ran like this:


10 print "We can't disconnect you without a faulty transmitter"
20 print "You can't talk to a manager you have to wait for one to get in touch with you"
30 goto 10

I hung up in a mix of anger and dispair...

What the hell did I do to get stuck with this. Oh thats right.. get a vf phone.. :(

[Ben]

CS makes or breaks a companies image. I've had to call Orange CS a great number of times over the years, gradually knocking my perception of Orange until I ended up taking out my Vodafone in addition. Vodafone have stayed relatively rosey in my eyes, mostly because I've barely had to call them!

Now I'm cynical. I'm becoming one of those 'try it once' consumers who, when stung, gives up and moves on.

[miffed]

TBH Teclo your experience of Vodafone CS seems very similar to mine

Especially this part


It turns out there was no log of the conversation with the manager or the decision to.......


This really wound me up , every time I speak to them - it takes ages to actually get to to agree to put things right , then on bill day , nothing has changed and there is no record of the problems , and (most annoyingly) they deny even having heard of the employee / manager that I spoke to in the first place !!

I rate them equal to (if not worse) than early Three CS :(

Absolute pants ! I try to have as little as possible to do with them as I can now

[3GScottishUser]

I can't say I have had any significant problems with Vodafone CS.

Had to call them with a billing problem this evening (I was being overcharged £5 a month) due to an adjustment last year to put Passport on an on-line price plan. I was advised at the time when they applied the temporary correction to call at the end of March 2006 to have them readjust the billing but I forgot and only noticed the total due was higher than what i should have been paying this month. Called Vodafone CS and they were fast, efficient and had all the notes about the adjustments and they sympathised that 'it was'nt likely anyone would remember to call back 6 months later'. After a few minutes on hold, a result, instant credit and an apology for the overcharging and a full explanation of what they had done to resolve the issue.

After a year I am still very impressed with Vodafone CS, 02 have always been good for me too and both appear to be UK based and prepared to go the extra distance to keep customers happy. A pity that the same experiences were not a priority with newer operators.

[getti]

It amazes me how when something like this happenes all of a sudden they have 'no record' of the convertation. Its like they agree with everything to make you happy and then do nothing about it knowing that it was not recorded.

Bet if you owed them money it would be recorded in every department, the FBI/CIA database, records with MI5 and even stored away so if there was a nuclear war and no one survived, all that would be left was a room full of files (1 stating you owe Vodafone money)

[Hands0n]

So far Vodafone CS has been good as gold to me, all queries and issues handled correctly and appropriately. But like anyone, I could well fall foul of a rogue CS rep in the future. The hard part is proving it.

There are services that you can use to record your calls and subsequently retrieve them as MP3 or WAV files for reproduction to support your case. The one I had in mind was Grumbletext (http://www.grumbletext.co.uk/page.php?pn=gtrecord) but this has gone out of business, although they hope to have another one up and running. There must be others.

[maxspank]

^ you need to be careful recording calls though, because if the advisor you speak to doesn't know they have been recorded (and vf customer services will hang up on you if you state that you are recording them), the tape will have no legal standing, and certainly vodafone won't take the tape as 'evidence'

[Hands0n]

Yes, good point. The service that Grumbletext used to run did pre-announce that the call being answered was being recorded "for training and quality purposes". Of course, it is impossible to prevent the VF Cust Service hanging up, but shame on them for doing so!

[teclo]

It amazes me how when something like this happenes all of a sudden they have 'no record' of the convertation. Its like they agree with everything to make you happy and then do nothing about it knowing that it was not recorded

That is my belief too.

While I was talking to the last manager, the helpful one, we went through the notes on my account. I told her that the girl I spoke to on the 4th told me that my sim must be worn out. We also discussed someone else from CS telling me to go to a VF store and buy signal booster patches for my windows.

She seemed quite glad to put complaints in against the unhelpful people, she was also helpful by telling me that I should not receive any more requests for payment and if I did, to call back and ask for CS to email the last person on the notes and she would credit me any money.

I feel as though I have been a bit of a moaner about this, I was fed up paying for something that was pretty useless where I live.

If I had remembered about it, I would have used the call recorder I installed on my phone for this sort of thing, but the first call of the day was from a landline in the office.