Upgrade to Gigafast has been an absolute horrorshow. Running out of energy.
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03-09-2022 08:36 PM - edited 11-10-2022 06:14 PM
I am writing this on behalf of my partner, who's the one who holds the account with Vodafone Broadband, but for the ease of myself and reader, I'll refer to her account as ''ours''.
In March 2022, we upgraded to Vodafone Gigafast on a £35 per month deal (half price). We were previously on one of their standard 90Mbps connections, so we expected the upgrade to be fairly straight forward. Oh no...
I won't go in to all the problems we had during the first week, as I'll be here all day, but instead I'll get to the worst part. It's now September, we still haven't been billed since the upgrade, we still have no account online in which we can view, when phoning customer services they can find our account, but it only holds data up to March this year and as far as they are aware the contract was cancelled - it wasn't, it was upgraded. We have now received a letter which states there has been a problem with our account (really!) and that we will be billed £50 per month! 1) there's no current deal for £50 per month that I can find and 2) we signed up for £35 per month, so whichever way you look at it, that's wrong.
Another call to Vodafone today (17th call since March, we've counted - not to mention at least 10 live chats), and they have no record of the letter, no record of an active account for us, no record of being signed up for any upgrade, no record of any new account, nothing. So we explained there has to be, we have a letter to say so, an email welcoming us to our new upgrade, text messages, order numbers, the lot. City Fibre even came in the house to do the upgrade, hell knows why I let them in, nothing to do with Vodafone it seems! They don't know who we are all of a sudden. After 40 minutes on the phone getting nowhere, the chap said he would put us through to the Broadband team, and of course, he cut us off....again.
I am writing this, because we just simply don't know where to go next, we're exhausted with customer services as there is no customer service, we wrote a letter back in June to complaints, no reply to that. We've tried live chat. What is there left to do?
We have a service, the one we signed up to, and it's all working, ever since March, but they cannot fetch our account details, they are going to charge random amounts that we never signed up to and we cannot get any customer service. We don't even have an online account we can access anymore. How can this be how a business is run, honestly? What should we try next?
Last but not least, the cooling-off period has clearly lapsed, but that's something else... we didn't even get chance to change our mind, because within the first 14 days (and even now), when phoning customer services, we have no active account! So there's nothing to cancel. Absolutely absurd.
One final edit to this: We have since tried live chat (again), no real help given, but asked if our cooling-off period can at least be reinstated as we never got chance to decide if we were happy with the service from the start and their reply was: "well you have been getting the service, right?''- 1) Manners?! and 2) We have always had the "service" in terms of the broadband, but we haven't had an account nor the customer service - so apparently that doesn't apply to your decision making when deciding if you're happy. Basically, every time we talk to customer service via any means, it just gets worse. Exceptionally horrible customer service. We are at that point where we need some kind of counselling service to help us get through to Vodafone, because no matter how hard we try, we cannot get a resolution.
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11-10-2022 06:09 PM
Unfortunately not, no. In fact the situation has just got worse and worse since my post. I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to assume Vodafone just offer free broadband to everyone and don't care.
I will write up a detailed update on this later this evening.
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12-10-2022 06:10 PM
Hi @thejoycey. We're sorry to hear that your Gigafast experience has been a complete whirlwind (to say the least). This isn't the smooth experience we want you to have, nor the service we strive for here at Vodafone. Both having access to your My Vodafone account online and receiving the required help when needed is essential.
As we don't have access to your Vodafone account via the Community, I would be unable to comment on the ins and outs of your concerns raised. That being said, it's important that we get this resolved and we certainly wouldn't want you to leave over this.
If you haven't done so already, so that we can take a closer look, I would recommend popping over a message to our Social Media team.
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13-10-2022 12:59 PM
Thank you for your reply.
My partner has been in constant communication with Vodafone via social media, every few days they ask her for her security details and provide an update, unfortunately the update is always “no update” - no one can even explain to her why the billing cannot be sorted out or what the big complication is.
she has also received an email stating her complaint has been closed because they were unable to contact her - which is very odd to say the least, if they were unable to contact her, how did they email to say they couldn’t contact her? If you get my drift. She also hasn’t changed phone number, address or any other details.
I honestly don’t see there ever being any change or real solution to this, it’s been on going since March. Nothing takes this long to sort if it’s ever going to be sorted.
Not much else she can do but move to another supplier if Vodafone don’t want to set her account up properly, or even bill her for that matter.
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14-10-2022 10:19 AM
Thanks for updating us @thejoycey I genuinely am sorry for the experience your wife is having trying to get this all resolved. The billing issue she is experiencing is complex and can take a long time to resolve but we will get it put right as quickly as we can. Once the service is reflected on the account, we can correct any issues with the line rental amount.
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15-10-2022 10:27 PM - edited 15-10-2022 10:28 PM
Thank you for your reply, I’ll admit I don’t know what billing issues are ongoing your end, but from the end users point of view, you provide a service, for which you take a payment via direct debit. How much more complicated than that can it be? Excuse me if I am being naive, but every other service I have ever subscribed to, it really is that simple.
If someone from Vodafone could spare just two minute of their time to explain what the issue is, maybe we would be less frustrated.
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16-10-2022 10:39 AM
Hi @thejoycey 👋 I can fully understand your frustrations. There are a number of interlinked backend systems which all need to talk to each other and hold the correct information in order for your account to work, and for bills to be produced. When there are issues with this we have a specialist team that work on your account to fix this, sometimes it is not easy to fix quickly as we never want you to lose service while we fix your account.
Thanks for your patience and apologies again for the time this is taking.
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18-10-2022 12:24 PM
Thank you for your reply, that’s the most detailed explanation we have had so far so at least we know it’s not always a simple fix.
Our main concern is at some point Vodafone will fix these issues, and then expect a back payment or some whopping big bill even though we have been promised we won’t be charged for the duration it’s taken to get this sorted to compensate the inconvenience which is fair enough. Part of me just doesn’t trust that will happen smoothly. The service has worked since March, but we haven’t been billed once, it seems crazy to me that Vodafone wouldn’t want to get this issue sorted straight away? We never had such problems on Vodafone with the previous service we had from you, in fact all we did was upgrade. Seemed so simple of an ask.
I really hope this gets resolved soon.
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19-10-2022 01:24 PM
@thejoycey - I can certainly understand your concern, regarding the invoices you've not received being back dated. Once the issue's resolved, my team in Social Media will look at this with your partner.