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So, yesterday I went into Northlands Mall to pay a cellphone bill that arrived with a bare handful of days due, and to cancel my plan account. It appears that Vodafone's sales staff are rather divorced from customer service - certainly, it was the worst treatment I've had from a telco for a while.
I went into the store to pay the bill, get someone to explain why my bill arrived so late, and to cancel my account - and could do none of those things.
I was told that I couldn't pay the bill there; I had to go to a post office shop further down the mall. The saleswoman had no idea why my bill arrived so late, or who I could to talk to about it. And in order to cancel my account, I have to call 777 - they can't do it for me in person. Which is annoying, because there's a $160 cancellation fee that I was hoping to get out of the way and pay right there and then... but hey, they can't take my money, it seems.
The post office shop down the mall wasn't there. In fact, it wasn't anywhere. I called in at the mall's information desk to be told that the post office desk had been closed, and the nearest one was at the nearest Kiwibank, which was closed. Lovely.
So, I sat down and called 777 to cancel my account. I recorded voice spent the next couple of minutes telling me that because Vodafone was "upgrading" their services, large amounts of account and billing information would not be available. And that during this upgrade, their customer service people would not be able to access that information either. And that I should be careful to monitor my account use over that time. And that the service would be inaccessible until the upgrade was completed on June 30th.
Bloody hell. Seriously, what kind of telco breaks its service for a month and a half in order to perform a systems upgrade? $160 to cut an run is beginning to sound like it's a deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the fucking century.
Anyway, eventually the recording stops and I get to a "press '0' for a customer service representative", and then to an actual human being. After getting identification stuff out of the way, I tell him that I'd like to cancel the account I'm calling from. He asks for reasons, and I tell him that the phone doesn't do what I was told I could do with it (i.e. I can't load my own Java apps onto it, and the Motorola Phone Tools drivers won't install on Win98 despite being advertised as doing so). He notes these reasons down, and transfers me through to the appropriate department - who aren't picking up the phone. He gets alternate contact details in case they can't reach my cellphone (no, 03 - that's in Christchurch, not Auckland).
So now they're going to call me back some time within the next two business days... which I can only presume means that I'll call them up at the end of Tuesday and try to ascertain what the hell is going on, and how I can stop being on their plan and go back to pre-pay. Huzzah.
Honestly, I'm not convinced that at-least-they're-not-Telecom is enough anymore.
I went into the store to pay the bill, get someone to explain why my bill arrived so late, and to cancel my account - and could do none of those things.
I was told that I couldn't pay the bill there; I had to go to a post office shop further down the mall. The saleswoman had no idea why my bill arrived so late, or who I could to talk to about it. And in order to cancel my account, I have to call 777 - they can't do it for me in person. Which is annoying, because there's a $160 cancellation fee that I was hoping to get out of the way and pay right there and then... but hey, they can't take my money, it seems.
The post office shop down the mall wasn't there. In fact, it wasn't anywhere. I called in at the mall's information desk to be told that the post office desk had been closed, and the nearest one was at the nearest Kiwibank, which was closed. Lovely.
So, I sat down and called 777 to cancel my account. I recorded voice spent the next couple of minutes telling me that because Vodafone was "upgrading" their services, large amounts of account and billing information would not be available. And that during this upgrade, their customer service people would not be able to access that information either. And that I should be careful to monitor my account use over that time. And that the service would be inaccessible until the upgrade was completed on June 30th.
Bloody hell. Seriously, what kind of telco breaks its service for a month and a half in order to perform a systems upgrade? $160 to cut an run is beginning to sound like it's a deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the fucking century.
Anyway, eventually the recording stops and I get to a "press '0' for a customer service representative", and then to an actual human being. After getting identification stuff out of the way, I tell him that I'd like to cancel the account I'm calling from. He asks for reasons, and I tell him that the phone doesn't do what I was told I could do with it (i.e. I can't load my own Java apps onto it, and the Motorola Phone Tools drivers won't install on Win98 despite being advertised as doing so). He notes these reasons down, and transfers me through to the appropriate department - who aren't picking up the phone. He gets alternate contact details in case they can't reach my cellphone (no, 03 - that's in Christchurch, not Auckland).
So now they're going to call me back some time within the next two business days... which I can only presume means that I'll call them up at the end of Tuesday and try to ascertain what the hell is going on, and how I can stop being on their plan and go back to pre-pay. Huzzah.
Honestly, I'm not convinced that at-least-they're-not-Telecom is enough anymore.
