Just sent an email to the executive team

[ssrij]

My email to the Vodafone UK CEO and Vodafone Group CEO:

Hi and good afternoon,

Thank you for taking the time out of your extremely busy day to read my email. I am a Vodafone UK customer and signed my 3rd contract with your company on the 9th Sep for a brand new iPhone 7, but so far, I have been lied to and misled by your customer service team regarding the delivery of my pre-order. 

I am sure you already know about this as I am not the only one who has experienced it, but I have been very disappointed by the kind of service I have received. I have had countless chats via your Live Chat service and called up 191 many times only to be given a different answer each time with no concrete date/time for my delivery. I have paid £400 upfront for my contract and will be paying over £1300+ over the course of next two years, but I have not been treated fairly. I was promised delivery on the Friday the 16th multiple times, but I didn’t receive my phone. I was then promised Saturday, then Monday but still haven’t got my phone.

I am also a computer science university student who is learning how to make great apps for iPhone and having the phone with me was of great importance so I can test my apps, which I cannot do right now and hence cannot take advantage of what I am currently learning at the university.

Please invest some of Vodafone UK's £6B annual revenueinto:

(1) Upgrading your IT infrastructure - your company took thousands of pre-orders and many of them weren’t even entered into the system before the end of the day, rendering the whole idea of pre-ordering early in the morning to avoid rush moot. This was because your system cannot accept so many orders during a rush and orders were instead noted down on pieces of paper. There are many more issues with it, which you can find more about in the forums. For example, your online tracker is broken - I pre-ordered a Galaxy S7 Edge on 24th Feb and was delivered on 8th March, but the online tracker still shows the order was under-processing, and your untrained and uninformed customer service team keeps redirecting people to the broken online tracker to check updates, even though it doesn’t work! That’s downright ridiculous. 

(2) Hiring more people from the UK/EU instead of outsourcing it to third world countries - Absolutely terrible customer service they provide and they would lie to you all the time to get you off the chat. I just had a chat and was told the delay for my iPhone is 8 weeks, that’s unacceptable - even Apple’s own estimate is only 1-2 weeks for the iPhone 7 - and they always like to overestimate so most likely it’s just a week.

(3) Training your customer service team - The customer service also needs much more training and told not to lie to customers. You might as well set up a dedicated team that can manage information relay between different call centres across the globe. Instead of lying, they need to simply tell the truth. No customer wants to be lied to and given a different answer by a different person each time. If I was told when I pre-ordered that there will be a big delay then I would’ve been happy, but I was lied and misled several times. It’s better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver. The irony of Vodafone is being a communications company and failing at communication is just sad.

(4) Improve transparency - EE is regularly providing their customers updates regarding their pre-orders on the forums - down to day by day update of phones coming to the warehouse and getting shipped via DPD. They also had a huge demand of phones, but the way they are handling it is a million times more professional than Vodafone. Even their CEOposted a video apologising to the customers and reassuring them that their preorders will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

(5) Establishing a better relationship with your suppliers/distributors - Your company gave everyone who pre-ordered the iPhone on the 9th a promised delivery date of 16th, but then messaged nearly everyone on the day of promised delivery that it’s not arriving because of less stock. Now, your company must already be knowing how much stock it has or will be receiving, it cannot be that your supplier/distributor just randomly dumps a random number of stock into the warehouse. If your company didn’t have enough stock, then it shouldn’t have promised delivery to everyone. Or maybe your distributor/supplier does randomly show up and dump a random number of stock into your warehouse and your company just assumed it would be enough to meet the demand - in that case your company needs to establish a better relationship and communication with them so you always know how much you’re getting. I am no business man and I don’t know what goes behind the scenes, but your company must have or should have an idea of how much stock it should be receiving to fulfil such orders in the future. There needs to be more control on your side and in future, promised delivery dates should only be given as long as there’s confirmed stock to fulfil those promised delivery dates.

Vodafone is a great company, I love the plans, offers and signal coverage (best in my opinion), but there’s serious issues that need to be sorted out as soon as possible. I have been loyal to this company since years but issues like these get everyone frustrated.

Thank you for reading my email,

Suyash, a Vodafone customer

[aquestion]

 @Cara b it appears the link you told me would be working soon is still a dead link so when exactly will it go live? Your EE Forum equivalents have managed multiple updates and insights and possible solutions for customers while your team and yourself have managed a few far from insightful replies.

We will not think any less of Vodafone if you copy the EE forum style of regular update with an FAQ, possible solutions and some insight.

[d4c1981]

If you haven't got anything useful to say don't say anything at all Viki. Your copy and paste forum replies only fuel the fire. Vodafone has treated it's customer base terribly and many of these customers are returning to upgrade. This is unacceptable and disgusting in 2016.

[aquestion]

Well after checking the Vodafone tracking page all week as advised by the tech team, emails and Vodafone info pages and the eta being 16-23 of September I wasted part of my morning yet again having to travel to the vodafone store to double check Vodafone poor information system had let me down.

So the one thing the tech team and other Vodafone staff communicated we can trust earlier this weekalthough I have noticed it's not mentioned so often now. Is not working as you might expect for a company that was earlier saying this was the all knowing oracle.

Another item of misinformation stated regularly by Vodafone that they were reassuring customers would work. Which was used to reassure customers not to cancel or indeed to make orders..

[waltdisnae]

@kids so if Vodafone knew that they would never have known how many phones they were due to get in, then they could never have known if they could fulfil all "iPhone 7 pre-orders placed before midnight on Sunday 11th September" on launch day as so boldly promised all over their website? 

[waltdisnae]

All round this has been a farce and these Vodafone replies are nothing short of insulting, why bother having this forum?

[kids]

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@waltdisnae wrote:

@kids so if Vodafone knew that they would never have known how many phones they were due to get in, then they could never have known if they could fulfil all "iPhone 7 pre-orders placed before midnight on Sunday 11th September" on launch day as so boldly promised all over their website? 

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The same has happened with all networks in promising first day delivery and it has happened year after year after year.

I assume that Vodafone just like other networks know roughly how many handsets they will have orders for and place orders for those, but when the manufacturer underestimates its production capabilities then everyone is hit and in the end the customer is the ultimate victim.

I think that this year Apple either made a serious underestimate of the demand or they had production problems, whichever it was we will never know as Apple never comment on such things.

Just a couple of days even the Apple stores were unable to predict when their next delivery would be so if Apple don't know what chance to the networks have?

The whole thing has been frustrating if you are / were waiting for a phone but the hysterical posts by some people have been way over the top, as I have said before "It is a phone it is not a life changing / threatening event."

[waltdisnae]

@kids no I'm sorry but there is no defending Vodafone's actions. They promised on their website that all orders placed before the end of Sunday 11th would be fulfilled. Vodafone did, not Apple, not the other networks. I ordered before 8:20 on the 9th. That is an extremely small percentage of all orders placed before the end of Sunday I am willing to bed. Thats quite a shortage. They were never going to be able to do it, so should not have made that promise. That is the regulations they are supposed to abide by and didn't. 

Regardless of what the item is, companies should not be left to do as they wish.