Crappy Customer Service at Vodafone

I know I’m very near to 40 now so I’m getting into that “Grumpy Old Woman” stage but come on England! What the hell is up with your customer service? I have experienced some astonishingly crappy customer service lately and I feel the need to NAME and SHAME the offender as I think crappy customer service should just not be stood for!

Prime Suspect: Vodafone

I began a process to get mobile service through Vodafone about 3 weeks ago. I thought this would be a simple process. I thought I would be able to go into the store with my gifted BlackBerry Storm 9500 and walk out with a functioning phone. How wrong was I? Very!

Our local Vodafone store’s system was down on the day I went in. Nothing could be processed as their entire computer system went kerfluey. I’m not sure why they were open then, to tell you the truth. The employees looked harassed and hot and their sales patter was less than effective. They assured me that someone would ring me within 24-48 hours to set up an account. I’m still waiting for someone to ring me in that regard.

I’m impatient so I proceeded with online registration. That, I may add, went off without a hitch. There was even a handy “on-screen” operator called “Hillary” who guided me through everything I needed to do. Easy Peasy. I only had to wait for 2 days for my sim card to arrive. Great. I document this in my post entitled Technological Difficulties. It’s a good read. You’ll enjoy it!

After dealing with unbelievable incompetence in store and on the phone; after enduring 75 minutes (60 minutes of which was on hold) on a premium phone line over 2 days time speaking to umpteen different service operators, several of whom barely spoke English; after listening to mind-numbing “on hold” music that made me want to bash my head in do you think I would want to remain with Vodafone? Erm…let me give you one guess…

Vodafone noticed my tweets on Twitter and responded. They commented on my Technological Difficulties post and encouraged me to email them. I actually spoke to a representative of Vodafone. What do you think they could do for me to show me how sorry they were for my inconvenience and trouble? Jack all.

I was assured by said Vodafone representative that they would address the customer service issues “in house” and that I should not have been kept waiting as long as I had been and that it was unfortunate that the mast was down thus rendering my service options null and void. He assured me that it was a shame that the operators couldn’t seem to tell me at the beginning of this process that the BlackBerry Storm 9500 phone that I was trying to arrange service for was not, in fact, wi-fi capable and that, yes, they should have been able to tell me that when I first asked about it. Again, it would be addressed “in house”.

Gee, I’m so pleased. I expect that there will be a whole training session on how NOT to keep your customers on hold for 3/4 of their time on the phone and how NOT to mislead your customers by NOT knowing anything about the model of phone which they are enquiring about. Vodafone employees are going to love me at their next training session! I’ve given them so much to learn. Maybe they will invite me to this training session so I can role play the situations again and see how they might handle it differrently this time.

Back to the real question here, though. What was Vodafone going to do to entice me back to their mobile network after I had, sadly, cancelled my contract? Well, actually, nothing. You see, as I had cancelled my account, there wasn’t much they could do for me after all. Sorry. Oh, wait, well, after a bit more emailing they did decide that if I wanted to come back to Vodafone they would give me…wait for it…a WHOLE MONTH FREE!!! Basically a month to decide if Vodafone was the right mobile network for me. No! A whole month free!

NOT BLOODY LIKELY!!!! You see, when a company treats me like rubbish, can’t deliver on services, doesn’t know basic information about their product, keeps me waiting for a ridiculously long amount of time and isn’t even willing to make amends to preserve their reputation then I’m not going to waste my hard-earned pittance on their service and thus be locked into an endless contract of hellish service and problems. Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice…shame on me. I don’t like to be ashamed so I’m not going to be fooled again.

Vodafone…you’ve lost a customer. You’re on my list. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you and ultimately you could give a rip but my list lasts forever…and I have friends (a few) and I’m going to be sure that they know all about my experience…that’s what I’m doing now. Sorry Vodafone…better luck next time!

Now, where’s O2?