DISQUS

Hi Ewan,

Thanks for the explanation, always an interesting read your blogs are!

I'm really sorry about the inconvenience of not being able to do as you wanted. Your glowing view of Vodafone's connected approach in times past is still the case, so it looks to be a matter of crossed wires during your recent visit to the Oxford Street store.
Whilst we have a number of channels which undoubtedly have their own area of expertise (stores having sales, 191 having account specific service, not forgetting the eForum for technical help) all areas are adequately equipped to help any customer with any query, any time.

I've spoken to the manager of the branch in question, Pete, and he actually remembers your visit. He recalls you were with one of his best advisers, and as a result there’d be no reason for him to intervene as he could hear everything was being done correctly. Pete said you’d be more than welcome to have approached him if you weren’t satisfied.

The information given was correct regarding extensions, as a six month extension is required for changes to certain plans and in the instance of a line being out of commitment. The store were just thinking it’d be worth calling to see if a change was possible without extension, as business rules differ slightly between your customer service team and that store. Pete did say calling the team for you would have been their next step, but that you were in a bit of a hurry and so they didn’t have sufficient time.

Moving on to the upgrade, Pete would have loved to have sent you away with a shiny new Magic that day, but upgrades are based on the history of the individual number you’re extending the contract of, and the prices are produced by a system rather than manually, to make it consistent and fair.

One last thing, on the topic of Online Billing, we're on the task of making huge improvements to that service. We'll soon have added functionality so that you'll be able to change your own price plans online, on top of the existing features like viewing your bills, changing Direct Debit details and making payments. As you can't currently use these features due to that pesky error message, I'll take a look at your account and fix this at the same time as sorting your price plans, if you haven't called us already.

I hope that explains everything and makes sense of it for you. If you’d like to speak to me or Pete, just let me know. Pete did say he hopes you’re not deterred from returning to his store, and that he looks forward to seeing you there in the future!

Best Wishes

Thomas Rushton

Web Relations Team

Vodafone UK

Hi Ewan,

I completely understand Graham being frustrated about his experience with us, and would love to explain.

We've actually been in the process of updating to a shiny new billing platform for several weeks now, and the issue Graham's experienced is an unfortunate teething problem as a result of that. Several users (including myself) have had difficulty seeing unbilled data, or in actually viewing bills which we emailed them to say were available.

My account's working fine now, so this could well be the situation for Graham too (not sure how long it is since his email to you?) If it's not still working though, drop me an email with some contact details for Graham and I'll see that the issue is addressed, along with any other outstanding cases. We appreciate how important it is for every one of our customers to have visibility of what's in their phone bill, and understand the convenience of quick and easy access that online billing provides, and for this reason we're working as hard as we can to resolve any such issues.

In the meantime, if Graham or anyone else reading this is anxious to see their bills, we can of course issue paper copies in the short term to provide ultimate peace of mind. Customers can arrange this by calling 191 free from their mobiles. Alternatively you can dial 44555 free from your handset for a quick breakdown by text until it's all up and running again.

Good Afternoon Ladies and Gents,

What a nightmare! Simply not good enough. I've spoken to Funda about this and I'm hoping we've found a suitable solution, but I shan't say any more for now.

As for Jim'll Fix It, I never pictured you as a shellsuit, medallion and big cigar kind of guy Ewan :lol:

Have a nice day everyone,

Tom

Vodafone UK