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Vodafone responds to my text-bundles issue. I can go to the ball! I shall have more texts!

Kudos to Tom Rushton of the Vodafone Forum Intervention Team. They really are doing a brilliant job at scouring the internet for people having problems with Vodafone, correcting any misunderstandings and doing their utmost to rectify issues.

Although I do think the name of the team, ‘Forum Intervention Team’ — it’s a little bit functional, isn’t it? A bit KGB. ‘Internet Relations Team’ perhaps? Still, doing a good job.

Tom was having trouble posting a reply to my ‘I can’t add any text bundles to my account‘ post so he knocked me over an email with it instead.

First, here’s a reminder of the key issue I was having:

Eventually Saj phoned the call centre and found out that, since I’ve got ‘unlimited landline calls’ on my account, I cannot purchase more text messages in a bundle.

Both Saj and I were a little confused.

‘Would you like to swap to unlimited texts?” came the question from the call centre.

‘No,” Saj explained, ‘The customer wants unlimited landlines and wants to add extra texts,”

We both waited. I rolled my eyes. I could already see what was coming.

Welcome to Vodafone, land of the binary. It’s one or zero. One or the other. You can’t have both. You’re either screwed for 35p/minute calls (after your bundle) or you’re nailed for 12p texts (after your bundle).

Vodafone wouldn’t, I was led to believe, let me add text bundles to my account. Both the chap in the shop and the chap at the call centre weren’t having any success.

Tom solved the problem for me. Here we go:

Hi Ewan,

We at the Vodafone Forums team were ever so disappointed to see that you’ve had a problem with your account. I really don’t understand why it’s been stated that you can’t change the texts on the price plan that you’re on.

On all of our current price plans (excluding ones with the Unlimited Texts offer) you can choose from either 100, 250, 500 or 1000 texts. You just pay extra to jump up to the next level from whichever one you’re on with your current price plan. I’ve checked on our systems and the Unlimited Landlines offer you have shouldn’t affect this.

Would you mind getting in contact with us via email? I’d love to get your account fixed and get you onto exactly the price plan you wanted. If you go to the URL pasted at the bottom of this message, enter your account details and a brief explanation of the problem we’ll look into this. Please include the code [removed] in your message too; this will route your query to the Forum Team.

I’m sure we’ll be able to get this sorted for you, and I have my fingers crossed we’ll see some blogs on here in the near future about how well things are going with your Vodafone account,

Tom, Vodafone UK

Right on. I’m going to sort that out shortly. Thanks for taking the time Tom.

I’ve added Vodafone to my how to do good blog relations presentation.

5 COMMENTS

  1. The power of this Blog! Now If BLYK listened to me, the world would be a happy place! Maybe Switching to the big red was not so bad after all eh mate!

  2. While this is very nice and all, you shouldn’t have to be hunted down by the dark angels of vodafone in order to be given proper service. In fact, I don’t even know why you should have to interact with a human at all in order to add features to your plan or take features away, me thinks they force you to talk to someone just so they can trick you into keeping your current rate or paying even more.

    Oh well, what do I know, I’m on prepaid and I’m loving it!

    Stefan Constantinescu’s last blog post..Mixmeister Scratch makes you an iPhone DJ – scratch your way through your iTunes library

  3. …shouldn’t that slide read: “how to do good blog relations if you are a top spender, have a huge following and ability to publicly emabarass the CEO”?

    Great that Ewan’s issue is solved, but makes you wonder how many normobs out there get the same amount of love. Took me an email to the CEO to get my billing issue solved.

    Does smack a bit of ‘National icon gets bumped up council house ladder after going on TV while thousands languish in rental penury’ or similar. This industry still has a loooooong way to go before good customer service is the norm. When less than 10% of customers trust their MNO’s, there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.

    /m

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