Vodafone customer services: the case of the mysterious 6p

How not to do customer services, part 94 – fresh from the Vodafone team:

(a) You provide someone with a free broadband internet trial; note the word “free”.

(b) You mess up in all sorts of way (see blogs passim).

(c) You therefore extend the period of the free trial; note again the word “free”.

And then (drum roll please…)

(d) You put a 6p charge on the account, you don’t tell the customer, you therefore decide the account is unpaid and you terminate the broadband service before the expiry of the extended “free” trial.

(e) You then take 30 minutes on the phone to sort this problem. When asked to pass the issue on to a manager to investigate what’s gone wrong with the customer service you tell the customer that there is a manager immediately available to talk to to them but instead put the caller on hold again.

(f) When rung again, you say that neither the manager nor the other person from the 30 minute phone call have recorded anything about it, you don’t have any records of any of the other previous problems available and all the details must be given over again before someone can take up any complaint.

And then (second drum roll please…)

(g) You then get someone else to ring back who again, er…, doesn’t have proper records of what’s already been said, expect the customer to rectify the situation by retelling all the details again – and twice tell the customer they’ve not provided information that they’ve already provided. Oh, and you also blame things on your earlier decision to split different records between two different accounts.

Classy.

It’s the outsourcing of record keeping to the customer that I really like. Why spend money on getting your staff to record information and share it with colleagues when you can expect the customer to do it for you 🙂