Rob's Blog

Vodafone UK demonstrates exceptional levels of incompetence
Mar 9th 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 ;)