@Natasha I was planning to follow the instructions in your PM, but, on reflection, attempting to deal with the situation by fixing one account at a time - presumably by giving us new accounts - is going to be hideously heavy on manpower. My husband had to have his account replaced a while ago, and it isn't the world's easiest process - we fouled up at the first attempt, and had to go through it twice.
I'm not sure how long ago the format of account numbers changed (within the past 10 years, from the evidence of my records) but there must be thousands of us affected by this, possibly tens of thousands or more, all long-standing customers with quite a track-record of loyalty. Some probably won't discover for some months that they can no longer access their accounts, especially relatively low-rate users with non-smart phones, but this doesn't mean that alienating them is consequence-free.
For some of those affected, the app is unlikely to be an alternative at all, and frankly the app is still pretty rubbishy for PAYG; and the group will include plenty of customers like me who have had their accounts for 20 years or more, and are still quite proud to say "I'm with Vodafone". If CS or Live Chat repeatedly puts customers through what are clearly inappropriate hoops, this is just going to alienate customers further, and plenty of them are going to follow srpsrp's example, and take their business elsewhere. Around here signal is poor, and Vodafone is marginally better than the other networks, so sentiment plus inertia will probably keep me here, but the increasing profile, availabiity and quality of the rivals serves as a permanent reminder that one of the glories of PAYG is the freedom to leave whenever one feels like it.
Since the problem seems to have taken Vodafone by surprise, I assume the change in programming was inadvertent and can be reversed. If there is some good reason why it can't be reversed, then either the old account numbers need to be replaced in some automated way or there needs to be some attempt to alert customers, and CS and Live Chat need to be made aware of what advice to give customers, rather than endlessly and pointlessly resetting passwords.
For the moment, I think I'll just keep the situation under review.
[I've assumed that PayM accounts aren't affected - if they are, things could get very "interesting".]
.png "Community Manager"){kind=icon}
