Rob's Blog
Vodafone UK demonstrates exceptional levels of incompetence
09th Mar 2007 11:03
In our little town of Samford Brett in Somerset we can no longer receive incoming mobile calls. This affects everyone covered by the local cell tower. To be honest, I don't know if that's 10 people of 10,000.
The problem will presumably be fairly quick to fix. That is – when Vodafone send the engineers to the correct tower.
As far as we can tell:
- On Monday evening the cell tower evidently went 'wrong'
- On Tuesday nobody noticed we couldn't receive incoming calls. We still have full signal and can call out – but all incoming calls get rejected
- On Wednesday I spent three hours convincing Vodafone there was a problem. An engineer was given the job. I was assured I would be phone back by the engineer with a report
- On Thursday I phoned for a status check and was told it was in progress
- On Friday my neighbor phoned and was told no fault had been reported
There most certainly is still a problem, so why had Vodafone closed the technical ticket?
Because they sent the engineer to the wrong tower. As a result of not finding a fault the ticket was closed, and they deemed it unnecessary to call me back as there was 'never a problem in the first place'.
The ticket has now been reopened, and within 72 hours I might receive a call back from the engineer and, possibly, from customer services.
So far:
- Vodafone seem to need to be convinced by their customers that a tower is faulty, even though it took the customer services agent about 10 seconds to check on the system and discover there was a problem
- Vodafone are capable of sending engineers to the wrong tower
- Vodafone will not call you back if they decide that you were wrong in the first place
- Vodafone really don't seem particularly concerned that our network is down.
- Vodafone think that £1.60 off my bill for every 24 hours the network is down is suitable compensation.
I now face a moral dilemma:
I want to send them an invoice for doing their technical support for them. But if they actually paid it would mean I worked for them... and ritual suicide seems a high price to pay for getting my point across ;)
