Seems Vodafone accidently double billed some credit card paying customers and will eventually rebate them. Looks like they haven’t told their customers about the snafu though.
The bit that interests me is the crappy customer service that Conor got. I own the pretty much dead blog IWillNotHold.com (Which is coming back as a different service later this Summer) and this is the kind of customer care you should not have to deal with.
Got this from Conor Byrne:
Have you heard about Vodafones double charging of customers who have paid by credit card. I am one of those customers. When I discovered the charge I rang Visa and was told to ring Vodafone. I rang Vodafone and the girl in Customer Care (thats a joke) told me that no there was no double charge on my account. I was looking at the charge and explained to her I didnt care what her screen was telling her, that I WAS double charged. She then went off to “speak to a supervisor” (God I hate that line) and then told me to fax the proof. I had to prove to them! I said I had no access to a fax machine and could I email it….no there was no email address (really an organisation the size of Vodafone has no staff emails?). Eventually I got an email. That was 11 days ago. And there is still no refund on my account. I have had to email Vodafone 4 times to see what is going on before I even got a reply…and this is the reply I got:
Vodafone email:
It has been discovered that due to a technical error, some credit card payments made on My Vodafone by a small number of customers were duplicated for each paying customer.
Some customers who made CC payments between the 23rd of April and the 11th of May were charged on a duplicate basis.
The issue is currently still under investigation and a rebate will be applied shortly.
Unfortunately I wish I could give you more information than this, but this is all I know at the moment. I do know that a rebate is going to be applied but not the exact date when this will happen, and I am not in a position to refund the card myself as this is being dealt with at a higher level.
It kind of gets better, they haven’t actually informed customers about this. They need to figure it out themselves:
When I asked to speak to the person who would know (the higher level person) what was going on I was told to call Customer Care on 1907!!
Do Vodafone just not care. They didnt communicate with me to tell me this had happened, didnt assure me that it would be resolved quickly, didnt call me (lets face it they have my number) or email me (and everyone else) to tell us what the latest was.
Photo owned by Robyn Gallagher (cc)
I wonder about the potential of the following:
(a) After the company has been notified and had time to rectify the error, if ti still hasn’t, is there a basis for reporting the theft or fraud to the gardaà — on the basis that the act of retaining the money that was initially taken in error moves the situation into the criminal domain
(b) Going to the small claims court.
As a matter of interest, is the issue of errors in billing not being rectified within the remit of Comreg?
Had the opposite problem – wasn’t billed for 6 months. Then I got told that I had recieved letters warning me about the problem (tip folks: just because your computer tells you’ve they’ve been sent doesn’t mean that they’ve actually gone out the door!).
Then they cut me off. Or at least they thought they did. Systems in that department were just as effecient as the bill-sending ones.
Ended up me pointing out the entire problem to them (found out about it when changing tariffs). Happy to pay the money, but didn’t give a high degree of confidence.
Paul
Standard of customer service is not a competitive differentiator in Ireland ‘cos the Irish generally roll over and take what’s given to them up the arus. Hence cust service operations for the likes of companies such as we are discussing tend to be under-resourced – and they’re no better or worse than the alternative vendors.
Had the same problem, well similar to yours, in that they were using the right acfcount number for direct debits
The bad direct debits were showing up on their computer despite there being sufficient funds in the account, but the bank statements I was getting there was no sign of any attempt to take the money out of my account.
Anyway, got massive bill for €300 and wondered how this happened which is when I discovered they were not taking the money. Agreed to pay it off bit by bit and re-initialise the direct debit. After three weeks of paying off the amount they disconnected the line.
After that I asked them for the network unlocking code for the handset and terminated the billpay account. Initially they refused to give me the code, but after I told them that they could either give me the code or I bring the phone into town and have it done for a tenner, they gave me the code.
They reneged on an agreement which was caused by their error, not mine, so I will keep them at arms length from now on.
All the mobile cfompanies are bastards
3 mobile, you can’t understand a word their customer service people are saying
o2 – haven’t even got a 3G network and their prices here are a rip off compared to o2 in the UK
Meteor – Trying to get anything done in relation to number porting or handset unlocking requires a credit card
and Vodafone, well they are just Vodafone.
They reneged on an agreement which was caused by their error,
That should read, which was necessitated by their error.
Our issue was slightly different, we moved house whilst being Vodafone customers, there was no reliable signal in the new place so we cancelled our account. Because they couldn’t provide us with a proper service we were exempt from a break of contract fee.
However, several weeks after cancelling our account Vodafone decided to randomly take €400 out of our account, when we got in contact and explained what had happened and asked why they did this we were basically told we have no idea but they were very sorry and we would be refunded imediately. It only took them three months to pay us back which was a fantastic result compared to their compeditors Esat who took over a year and a half in a similar situation.
Clearly we’re just not getting angry enough to get things done but I have tried that route before with Micro Direct, even though I got what I wanted in the end it just resulted in spending months being very angry and head wrecked.
iwillnothold.com is a new one to me, I have been thinking for a while of setting up a site giving people a platform to rant about companies that caused them pain, nothing like a good rant to get it out of your system. Myabe we should join forces and spit poison together.
You can’t ever get to speak to a person, other than customer care call centre folks, in Vodafone. You know I have been told that their CEO doesn’t respond to customer queries. What’s that all about? So you are telling me the CEO doesn’t care?
Its great to get a bit of conversation going about this, its clear that I’m not the only one affected.
Now what are the chances they are going to do something proactive about all this?
Just call your credit card company and request a chargeback to your account.
You are not required to wait or do Vodafone’s work for them.
Yeh Mark, think its in the post, but that was the 1st thing I did, and as the charge wasnt on the same day it wasnt seen by visa as a duplicate
[…] Vodafone, all the best, good luck with your Customer Care. If you have any similar stories, please comment […]
So its only taken them about 3 weeks but Vodafone have undone the double charge. Not an apology in sight.
Good Luck, time to move my account
here listen people catch a grip will ya’s! yous aren’t perfect nor is anything these days! understandable that people act up over money issues. but lighten up….. to get so worked up over something so small is ridiculous! what if you were all angry bout this? then, leave your friends or family in bad temper, went about your business then got hit by a bus! is that the way you wanna be remembered? being angry over something so small?! to start up a blog like this is in itself taking it too far. come on there are more important things to waffle on about!
Where to start, qbr-redness? I really don’t know.
“to get so worked up over something so small is ridiculous!”
Being double-charged isn’t a biggie. Christ, are you wealthy or just blithering coward? How do you deal when being overcharged? Do you throw more money at those that try to rip you off?
“then, leave your friends or family in bad temper, went about your business then got hit by a bus! is that the way you wanna be remembered?”
The old ‘hit by the bus’ dilemma. * yawn * Do you want to be remembered with this comment? No, didn’t think you did. People ought to be angry. People ought to be complaining and letting companies that overcharge them, feel the pain.
“being angry over something so small?!”
Not small. Bloody expensive. Actually, do you have any vested interests in Vodafone?
“to start up a blog like this is in itself taking it too far. come on there are more important things to waffle on about!”
A blog like what? What are you talking about? This blog? This post?
All in all, you are a very interesting yet confusing study case, qbr-redness.
Vodafone – where do I start,
Mis-sold a policy. Cancelled my bill though they continued to charge.
Had to ring customer care abot 30 times, they refunded €100 off the final bill, promptly forgot about it and sold the debt to a debt collector who were trying to bring me to court until I produced the letter from vodafone customer care (which they had lost internally) showing the refund.
What a shower of incompetant screw ups.
I am a pay monthly customer yet I have been charged an additional £50 for a vodafone pay as you go/credit card, which I do not have. I did not even give them my details for this to happen! and they deny taking the money! I have no idea how I am going to get this back. So even if you don’t pay using a top up/vodafone credit card check your account.
qbr-redness are you the one who has been fiddling everyones account? And if leaving comments on such a website is taking it too far, then why are you? Are you an idiot or what?
[…] has stripped people of a lot of prepaid credit. Check now and let your friends know! Becuase it wouldn’t be the first time this happened. . […]
I changed to a business phone (kept my number) with Vodafone a few months ago and I gave the direct debit details of my personal account as I had not opened a business account just yet. When I did open the business account I also opened a new personal account with the same bank and moved all my direct debits across, however I forgot to move Vodafone as I didn’t have the business account number to hand when I was doing all the work. To cut a long story short Vodafone were trying to take money out of my old bank account and failing as there was none in it. It was 100% my fault and my carelessness that I didn’t bother checking my bills as well. However last Wednesday was the first I heard of it when I got a text from Vodafone saying simply “Your account is about to be suspended please call 1907”. So I did and they told me that my DDs were being refused. I told them I would get back to them when I figured out what was going on. On Friday morning I emailed them and said that I would pay in the post ofice on Tuesday (today – as it was the only day I was near home to get an old bill to use to pay) and my apologies for the mixup. They replied back a few hours later and said they had disconnected me and that I would be reconnected when I paid cash. I rang them (it was Friday evening at this stage) and asked them why the hell they did that when I said I would pay on Tuesday? They said it was not their department etc etc. So not wanting to cut my nose off and all that I said I’d pay by credit card and be done with it. The guy informed me that they would not accept credit card that I had to pay in cash at a post office for security reasons. I was then annoyed and emailed Vodafone asking them to cancel my 3G card which is on the same account and asking them how much it would cost me to cancel my phone contract with them. I got a one sentence reply saying “can you confirm you wish to cancel your phone account”. Which I didn’t, and I replied and said so. I have emailed them 3 times since then and they are not replying and now when I go into vodafone.ie it says my account is cancelled.
I really get the feeling they are laughing at me and taking the piss. I have been with vodafone for 10 years and I have probably spent the best part of €25k with them and they are treating me like this over a few hundred quid that was an obvious simple mistake on my part. The real problem I have though is that my phone number is now at the mercy of Vodafone. Despite the fact it is on the side of my van, on my business cards, on my website, and elsewhere I do not actually have any ownership of it. The lesson for me (apart from getting my act together and watching my bills) is to transfer that number to ready to go asap and use a bill phone for outgoing calls only. At least with RTG you effectively own the number and can chop and change as you wish. Also if if you don’t pay you can still receive calls and texts (I was just cut off entirely without notice).
I’m so pissed off, and I am really begrudging paying the bill today after all this. However the nose and face thing comes into play again.
My love affair with Vodafone continues….I should have left while I had the chance but now I am locked into an 18 mth contract and another 18 months of AWFUL service.
I am having issues with my phone and basically they want me to do all the running around to get it fixed, download this, upload that, drive to our offices on your time and we will see what we can do.
They are so unfocussed on their customers and focussed on themselves it is just astounding.
Vodafone at the worst at customer service, overcharge me they were meant to ring me back but they never dd. I had to ring 10 times. They are the worst company I have ever ever dealt with