Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Shame on you Vodafone

Hyperventilating with frustration, I have just sent Vodafone a formal email of complaint. Do you want to know why? Because they disconnected my mum's phone which is her only way to get hold of  anyone, even though she's done nothing wrong.

It's because I have so far found it absolutely impossible to get my mum's phone account transferred to her name, from my sister in laws. It was in the sis in law's name because they lived with her for a while (before they left with the relationship between her and my mum in utter tatters) and set up her phone at the same time. Before that I believe it was in my brother's name.

They won't do it unless they can speak to both the sis in law and my mother. The sis in law spent an hour on hold with Vodes before being able to do her half of the transfer (get her name off the account).

We had trouble with the next step though. My mum doesn't speak English, I told them (more than once). They were sorry to hear that, because after another long wait they told me that meant they could not transfer the account to her name.

Transfer it to my name then, I said. After 20 minutes or so they said no, they can't. Because I am already a Vodes customer and I'm not allowed to have two different accounts with them (wtf?).

Okay, I said. I give up. Please lets go back the way it was. Okay, they said, we'll do that.

Then they disconnected my mum's phone. My mum, who is 90 years old, fairly deaf, frail, only conversant in Cantonese and mostly illiterate, needs her phone to be working. Not least because her medical alarm is connected through it.

But it has been impossible so far to get her phone reconnected.

What I would like to do is to take our custom away and go start an account up with a competitor - but it's quite likely we'd have to get the sis in law to talk to Vodafone again to do the first part!

And one last thing - they were going to charge my mum an extra $1.50 each month for receiving her bill in the slow mail. Pretty shoddy, considering she doesn't do email and is unlikely to suddenly start.

Shame on you Vodafone.

4 comments:

Amanda said...

This is terrible. I hope they sort it out asap and apologise.

Violet said...

they've been doing lots of apologising, but the sorting out still needs to be seen to be believed (hopefully today).

Anonymous said...

Poor you and your mum!! How absolutely awful!! I had an enraging incident with Vodafone recently too. It took me FOUR days to get through to them. I nearly went out of my mind.

I do hope the issue gets resolved soon. Why on earth is language a problem? So long as she can prove she lives at her address, that should be fine?? Best of luck!!

Violet said...

kiwiyarns- it's because they insisted they'd have to speak to my mum in order to verify her identity etc. Even if I was at her house while on the phone with Vodes she would not have been able to understand them on the phone. Getting her to help the medical alarm people check her alarm was working again was hard enough!