Vodafone Customers - Check your account
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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)
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May 15th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
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 gardaí — 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?
May 15th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
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
May 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
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.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
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.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
They reneged on an agreement which was caused by their error,
That should read, which was necessitated by their error.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
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.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:04 am
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?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
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.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:34 am
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
May 19th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[...] Vodafone, all the best, good luck with your Customer Care. If you have any similar stories, please comment [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 5:03 pm
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
May 26th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
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!
May 26th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
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.
July 11th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
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.
July 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
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?
August 3rd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
[...] 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. . [...]