We will now be undertaking a re-training exercise for our front line staff, based around the learnings from these two incidents. We are reaching out to both customers to unreservedly apologise for the unacceptable experience they had with us and to fully resolve the issues they raised. “We fully acknowledge that the experience of these customers was poor and not to the standard we set for customer service delivery at Vodafone. In response we received the following statement. We got in touch with Vodafone in connection with both of these sorry stories.
“Then this morning they cut off my phone! I’m at my wit’s end with it. What had happened, she said, was that the credit that had been applied to her account had been used to pay her monthly phone bill – unknown to her – and when that ran out she started getting the texts again. She called into a store again “and lo and behold the bloody account still hadn’t been cancelled!” I started getting all the texts from them again saying I owed them over €500. She tried to sort it out and thought she had. Turns out they never actually cancelled the broadband.”
I couldn’t figure it out as my mobile is direct debit and there’s always money in my account. “After a few months I started getting text messages saying I owed them all this money. This was only after I threatened to take my mobile phone account elsewhere. There was a big and long row and they eventually agreed to waiver the cancellation fee. “They wanted a €550 cancellation fee! Even though I only signed up to their crappy mobile broadband on the promise of the Gigabit being installed in a few months, which they now are saying isn’t available at all!” And now I’m stuck with crappy mobile broadband.”Īnnoyed, she said she wanted to cancel the broadband and go with a better option. “The guy in the store called Vodafone, only to be told that they had made a mistake and that Gigabit broadband was no longer available in my area! No explanation as to why or why I’d been told it would be, never mind all the groundwork we’d done to our house. The next day I called into the Vodafone store." So I called Vodafone but the guy I spoke to could find no record of an installation appointment. "I immediately rang my husband but he said that he'd been there all day and nobody came.
In November Nicola went on a four-day trip to Budapest and when she returned she switched on her mobile and there was a voicemail from Vodafone saying that they were coming that day to install the Gigabit broadband. “They sent out an engineer who evaluated our site and told us we had to run a trench with necessary cables from our house to the telephone pole at the end of our road. In August or September of last year she told that Gigabit was now available. She says the mobile broadband was terrible. I had to sign a two-year contract for the mobile broadband but they assured me that there’d be no cancellation fees, that I’d just be switched from one service to another.” In the meantime she was advised to go with their mobile broadband and she was told they would “switch me over with no fees once Gigabit became available in my area. "I was told that their standard internet would be bad and that I should go for their gigabit broadband which would be available in my area in a few months," she said. In January a reader called Nicola, went into the Vodafone store in Killarney to discuss options for their new build just outside the town. “I told her she could do so when I got copy of a letter I sent or a recording to cancel my contract. Then she got a call from a courier saying her modem and other equipment was to be collected as the contract was being terminated. There was no show and when Marie rang Vodafone she was told no engineer’s visit had been scheduled. They did call and there was a promise of an engineer’s call the following day. The next day there was another long call to Vodafone and a promise that a manager would call. When she called the company again she was told that her non-existent desire to terminate the contract had been attached to her file in error.
She brought her laptop to her daughter’s house and discovered that she had been sent an email from the company saying that she had terminated her contract with the company.
Then, on September 11th, she got another text message saying they had tried to call her but she was not at home, but she says they could not have known this as “I have no broadband so my landline does not ring”. “Only for neighbours we would have missed the All-Ireland,” she writes. By September 17th she had received almost 20 text messages from the company either saying the problem had been fixed or promising that it would be soon, but still no joy.