Aug
27
2010
- I moved apartments two weeks ago and I still have no internet and won’t for another week.
- When I called Vodafone to let them know I was moving, I specifically asked whether they had any naked DSL plans. The guy I was talking to condescendingly explained that you can’t have internet without a phone service and basically treated me like an idiot. This was two days before vodafone publicly launched their naked DSL plans.
- The same weekend we moved, vodafone retired the www.vodafone.co.nz APN that Stephen’s and my phone was configured to use for our prepay mobile data, and didn’t even bother to let their customers know it was being retired. Hence we had no mobile internet for a week.
- Vodafone charged me a dollar just to talk to their useless helpdesk staff to ask about why my mobile broadband had stopped working. After being transferred from helpdesk to a ‘technical support’ person, all he could suggest was that maybe rebooting my phone wasn’t enough, and that I should take out the battery and sim card and restart it and then maybe it would work. After that failed he was at a loss until I specifically suggested to him that perhaps the APN settings had changed. After 5 minutes on hold he came back and confirmed that was the problem.
- Vodafone apparently can’t connect our phone line without knowing the phone number of the previous tenants (we don’t know what it was). When they discovered this, they didn’t do anything sensible like contact me and ask for the number. Instead, they just cancelled the connection request. They didn’t tell me about the problem until the connection date had passed and I called them …. 5 days later.
- They asked me to call them from the line so they could find out the number. I did so, and the helpdesk person I spoke to told me that they didn’t need my number after all, and they’d un-cancelled my request and I would be connected in four days time.
- When I wasn’t connected in four days as promised, I called back and was told that actually, the last person was wrong and they did need the number, and could I please go home and call them from the house so they could see the number, because it apparently wasn’t in the system from last time I’d called.
- I dutifully called them again and their system couldn’t see the number. Guessing the number was blocked, the only thing they could suggest was that I try to call myself and see if it shows up in my caller ID. How it could possibly show up in my phone but not in their system was something they couldn’t seem to explain.
- They didn’t suggest to me dialling 0169 to turn off caller ID blocking – the thing which a friend suggested to me which eventually led us to find out the number. They’re the telco, shouldn’t they know stuff like that?
- The fact that they will almost certainly try to bill me for three weeks without phone or internet service.
August 28th, 2010 at 7:05 am
This tells you how important knowledge management is for a company like this; and the value of having a better integrated support docs that they can check on the fly without having to ask someone else.
Not that our helpdesk has better set up but I’d assume a company at that size & the technology that they have to work with, would have sorted this out faster and better!!
Maybe it’s time to switch away from vodafone!?
I’ve only ever called their helpdesk once. Since it was 24/7, so I called them first thing when I woke up, still in bed. I wasn’t fully awake but I was hard done by and the girl was so rude. I forgot a pin to use the credit card to top up my account. There was some security setting on their end. So I asked them to reset it. She was like, what pin are you talking about? Your bank account, credit card …. (listed a whole lot). At the back of my mind, I thought, how many pins can vodafone reset? Why aren’t she listing something more relevant to this call?
In the end, I just told her not to worry and hang up, waking up quite angry actually! This was at least 5-8 years ago and I still remember the shock. I know it was 6am and all, but she was at work! She’s supposed to be helpful, not bening mean!
Since then I haven’t bothered calling them.
So, what’s happening with the internet now?
August 28th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Still got nothing. They emailed me last night to say that our new estimated date for connection is 3rd September.
And they DO have a customer contact management system that lets them see what previous contact I’ve had with them. Every single time I’ve called, they’ve put me on hold while they read the notes about the previous interaction. And despite that, they kept contradicting themselves.
Seriously considering changing my mobile to 2 degrees when I use my prepay balance. The main thing that’s keeping me with vodafone for internet is that other than this, their speeds and caps have been good, and I have lingering loyalty from having joined ihug 15 years ago.
September 8th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Ergh. I work very closely with the VFNZ contact centre, and this is why my job enjoyment is… not as high as it could be, let’s say.