Within Reason

Dear Vodafone, please bugger off

Posted by Ceri Davies Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:20:00 GMT

I decided to cancel my Vodafone account, so I submitted a question via their website asking what I needed to do. They replied and said this:

Further to your query regarding the termination of your airtime account,
we confirm the following:

In order to terminate your airtime account, we require 30 days cancellation
notice in writing as we are unable to accept termination requests via email.

This needs to be forwarded to us at the address noted below:

Vodafone Disconnection Department                                                                   
Vodafone Ltd
PO Box 549
Banbury
OX17 3ZJ

On receipt of your cancellation notice, a confirmation letter will be forwarded
to your account address, to confirm the receipt and that your cancellation
notice has been accepted.

If you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us                         

Kind regards

Julie Doe[1]
Vodafone Customer Services

So in good faith, I wrote to them at the above address, asking for a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) so that I could move the number to another provider. At this point, I thought that they would send me a letter confirming receipt and the date on which the cancellation would take effect. I’ll clarify that I was under this impression not only because that’s what they told me they would do, but because it’s common courtesy.

Instead, they started calling the mobile telephone concerned, up to 12 times per day (at which point we stopped counting; they didn’t stop calling), trying to speak to me.

Now the telephone isn’t used by me; I just pay the bills. It’s Stef’s phone, and she has rather a lot on her hands at the moment, looking after Max 24 hours a day.

So I wrote to them again:

Hello, further to enquiry xxxxxxx, where I was informed that in order to
close this account I needed to write to you, I wrote to you to close the
account and request a PAC.

It was not pointed out that I would also be required to endure a barrage
of calls to the telephone.

It is my understanding that your retentions team have been calling this
number up to 10 times per day; please stop this.  The telephone,
although I pay the bill, is used by my girlfriend who is currently
nursing a 4 week old baby full time and does not need this harassment.

You will not be able to speak to me by calling the above number, so do
not try.  Please issue the PAC number and confirm the notice of
cancellation forthwith.

Many thanks,

Ceri Davies

They replied, saying that they were rather sorry about that, giving me my PAC and closing:

Please note that I have put a note on your account "not to call the
customer" and I please be assure that you won't be getting any calls from
Vodafone.

I’ll grant you that the language isn’t great there, but I was happy with that.

So when they phoned again an hour later, I figured that it was just a delay with this filtering through, because I’m forgiving and stupid like that. Three more phone calls later, I picked up and advised them that I already had my PAC thanks and had been told that the account had been marked “do not call”. At this point, I was told that they couldn’t issue the PAC and that whether the account was marked “do not call” was completely irrelevant unless I was prepared to hand over my postal address right now; if I didn’t, they would continue to call until I did.

What, in the holiest name of fuck, is up with that?

[1]Not her real name. That was Anne.