Well it’s been a long time since I last put electronic ink, to online paper, and I have missed it. Lot’s of things have happened in the time I have been away from the cyber world writing down my mundane thoughts for all of sundry to read. And while I have been a way several matters have come flooding to my attention, which I will not hold back with my anger, but they have truly annoyed me.
So if you work for Vodafone then you may like this post, and wish to copy it and show it to your share holders or your chairman of the board as the issue that I wrote about a while ago, still isn’t fixed. You can read that particular post here! But for those of you who are to lazy to read my past attempts at blogging then basically Vodafone were being shit. There ‘call centre’ staff do not know what they are saying which is a surprise considering they have a pre-written script that they will continue to plough through whether it is relevant to what the customer has said or not.
In simple summing up terms my online account keeps resetting itself, or deleting itself. So every time I go on to my account I keep needing to register. Vodafone has tried to help with little result and inform me that I am wrong and what they are doing will solve the issue. I inform them, that I am once again looking at my computer screen where it reads “Welcome to Vodafone, thank you for registering your online account” I am also looking at my email where a new mail in the inbox from Vodafone is a nice “Welcome to your on-line account” message. The customer service agent who is now on page four of the script informs me “My system shows your account is active” Of course it’s bloody active I just activated it, but tomorrow it won’t be….
Basically this happens a lot, and when I try to head them off at the pass, by phoning up before I have activated the account the script informs the ‘Customer Service Agent” to jump to page 10. “Well Mr Scott I can talk you through how to set it up” I don’t want talking through, I know how to set it up, I’ve done it for the past six months every week, I want it to stay active. They then try to, with my permission delete the account and set it, and some other tricks that page seven of the script informs them to. With everyone I agree and say ‘It won’t work, I will be phoning back again tomorrow’ I am then assured that it will work, and I won’t need to phone back. The trouble is, when you talk to me, I write your name, the date, and time of the call and what is said so when I do phone back to prove page seven of the script was wrong and once again that Chinese proverb of the ‘Customer is always right’ I have evidence.
Anyway, I went to check my Vodafone at Home account which is broadband and landline, but in some boardroom brain wave the members of the board thought it would be great to join the two online accounts together, meaning for me to access my emails or my billing for the Broadband, I have to first sign (Sorry I mean register and then activate my account) and then click on a link to Vodafone at Home. This was where the trouble began. My “At Home” account had become deactivated. I have been told that if I do not use the account for a month then it becomes deactivated, and I need to ring them up to get a new activation code. However I had signed onto it only 2 week before, and surly with my email client on my Mac, the pop3 would be signing in to receive emails, so in theory it would never be deactivated. So began the phone call of a angry customer.
Now to get through to the ‘At Home’ people you need to phone 191, which was fine as I needed to speak to them about the online section of my account. Now the way to not piss a customer off is to leave him on hold with Musac, which is interrupted every ten seconds by a woman informing you that “You are next in Line” “Your call is important” “If you continue to hold your call will be answered” No shit, really…. Is that how telephones work??? You mean If I stay on the line, some one will pick up? I thought that if I hung up, then the ‘Customer Service Agent” would realise it was me who had just hung up and would phone me back. Anyway, eventually a man answered with “Hello you’re through to Vodafone Customer Service the Uk’s best Network Steve speaking how can I help?’ Now I could not let this pass…. “The Uk’s best Network” I repeated the quote to Steve, and asked did you really just say that? Steve swallowed deeply to try to force the frog down, but with the frog still at the back of his throat said “Yes Sir” Well I will be the judge of that, as I have evidence to disprove that statement.
Now I can’t have a go at Steve, as he is one of the few people at the Call Centre who knows what they are talking about, while he didn’t know what was happening and didn’t pretend to by reading random pages from the script he did put in a full complaint and have the issue escalated to the I.T team, but we have been here before and nothing has been fixed? So we will wait and see. Steve then passed me onto the ‘At Home Team” who when they gave me a new password, and talked me through how to change it to something I would remember as f3JKmNM45E just was not sinking in, no matter how much revision I did. I encounted a problem, the ‘At Home’ links would transfer me back to the online system, and lock me out of the “At Home” page.
Now remember they are the same company, but what happened was I was passed back and forth from the “At Home” agent to the “Normal 191” agent, both parties saying that it was the other systems fault. The reason why my “At Home” had been deactivated was due to my online one being deactivated, and the “191” agent saying that ‘At Home” account has nothing to do with you other online account” I decided to leave it there, as eventually the “At Home” team was going to let their I.T guy know about it called and this is no joke ‘Jeff’ well I think it was ‘Jeff’ with ‘J’ and not a ‘G’ I didn’t ask for conformation of this.
So we will see what happens when Steve phones me back next week to confirm the issue of the online account and Jeff phones me to tell me whats happening with the “At Home” account.
I’m sure Vodafone will be making yet another entry into this blog when as I predict the issue is not fixed.