Vodafone Wallet Support.

[Rs101]

Seems like another great idea from Vodafone has been let down by utterly inadequate support.

I've been using the app for a couple of months and it suddenly decided to block my card without any warning. 

I called support in Thursday who couldn't see why it was blocked and couldn't reset it. He had to escalate it to the technical team who would get back to me within 24-48 hours.

Today's Saturday and I'd not heard anything so called again. No update and the technical team don't work weekends at all, so I now have to wait until at least Monday to find out why my card doesn't work, or whether there's been any security problems with it.

There aren't any supervisors available nor do they have a complaints procedure at all 

This concerns me on a few levels...

1. No technical support at weekends, when usage will be high.

2. No info available on potential fraudulent use at all.

3. The person couldn't understand my point that if I'm told on a Thursday that I'd be updated within 48 hours, then waiting until Monday would miss that target...

And one final moan - I have no problem with overseas call centres, but please insist they use a decent VOIP connection so it's actually possible to communicate easily!!!

[Alex]

@Rs101 I do apologise for that. 

I can see from reading this thread that you're in contact with our teams - please keep us updated with any progress. 

[Rs101]

Customer Relations guaranteed they'd call me on Tuesday with an update (even if it was that there was no update from the wallet team). Guess what.. no call.

Not surprised at all

[Gemma]

@Rs101 - I’m sorry to hear you didn’t receive a call. If you’ve still not received it, please reply to the last email from my team on 1 August. We can then chase this up.

[Rs101]

So today, I receive yet another card pin reset request in the app, carry this out as usual and.....

my card shows as active and no longer blocked!

Tried using it and it didn't work though.

Called the support team again who escalated it (yet again) to technical . They responded within an hour to say they believe they've now resolved the issue and it should finally work. I'll be testing it tomorrow..

Technical haven't given any information to the support team about what the problem was, why it was blocked or what had been done to fix it though.

Support supervisor admitted that they don't have the information they need to support users - litlle details like the date a card changed from blocked to active (and vice versa). 

Apparently my case has been passed to management as an example of how their current support procedures aren't adequate to properly look after customers!

Hopefully reached the end of that part of this needlessly long saga. Just need Vodafone Customer relations to deal with a couple of aspects of the complaint.

[Rs101]

Oh boy. Vodafone Customer Relations get worse.

They'd agreed to pull a call recording to see why someone didn't send me an email as promised. That was 7 days ago.

Called today for an update - apparently calls are always listened to within 48 hours, except my request which just sat there being ignored. No one has any idea why that's the case - I've got to wait for a manager's call back to find out. That'll be another 24-48 hours.

They claim to reply to any incoming emails, except every single one I've sent. They see them on the account notes but apparently didn't realise that an email containing the line "please contact me with an update" was requesting a response.

Oh and on at least one occasion, they've sent me emails which haven't been recorded on my account notes. 

I now understand how Vodafone manage to consistently top the Ofcom complaints table, given that their senior complaints team are this poor at basic admin tasks, let alone actually trying to resolve issues.

[Alex]

@Rs101 Please let us know how you get on after the callback. 

If you require them to chase anything up, they should've provided you with a number to contact them directly, give this a call. 
I do apologise that this issue is taking a long time, and I can understand your frustration. 

[Rs101]

Yes, they passed on a phone number. I've had to call it far too many times because they don't call when promised.

The good news is that i actually managed to use my Wallet app to pay for something today! So it's been fixed, but no one knows what was wrong or why it took so long.

My frustration is down to 2 things:

1. Vodafone wallet technical team are very slow to respond to wallet support team (and don't give meaningful responses anyway).

2. Customer Relations team are not fit for purpose and there's absolutely no way to make anyone in Vodafone who has the power to do something about it aware of their utter incompetence.

[hrym]

If a problem has to be escalated, it can sometimes take a while to fix.   I agree, though, that the frontline customer service people are not good on wallet (probably because they don't get many queries on it).   If support is going to be delegated to them, there should be a clear route for them, though they will be mostly working from a script.  This sounds like a technical issue of the sort that I'd expect to be beyond them and, from what you say, it does sound as though it was correctly escalated.

Because of the security aspects of the wallet app, I wouldn't expect a lot of information to be forthcoming about the nature of the fault, but some sort of communication should have happened - if only someone who'd reply to you and say "we're still working on it".

The main thing is that it's sorted now.

[Rs101]

I found the frontline wallet staff really helpful (they're an outsourced team in Canada), but they don't have the tools to do their job properly. Example - they can tell if a card was activated or blocked, but can't see the date that status changed. 

The problem is the actual technical team are a competely separate company and there's no SLAs for responding to issues or escalated ones. So my issue was 5-6 weeks without any response from them at all and there was nothing they could do.

I'm actually starting to wonder if the issue was down to a problem with the app - it suddenly started working after the update this week. I think the card may have been waiting for a new pin to be issued, but the app couldn't handle that request until the latest release. 

Luckily this wasn't a problem with a core part of Vodafone's service - after my experience of Customer Relations, I'd hate to have a major fault if they were the 'expert' fault processing team. 

[Rs101]

Customer relations incompetence continues..

Twice now I've been promised a manager would call me within a given timescale and twice they've not done so.

No explanation at all why, just a cast iron guarantee it won't happen again.. which of course it does.