READ ME - my poor customer service from Vodafone

toad2898

I posted this on Vodafone's e-forum in a number of their sub forums and unsurprisingly they removed it within minutes and e-mailed me directly. They won't be able to remove it from here though, I think people deserve to see this.........


Hello. I've been having issues with a Sony X10 mini pro which began 6 weeks ago. Since then I've been trying to find a resolution but to no ovail. A month ago I sent an e-mail directly to vodafone explaining my problem but I never even recieved a reply and they've been passing me round departments every time I phone. So here is my complaint letter I e-mailed to them for everyone to see to let people see how Vodafone treats it's some of it's customers. I've been a Vodafone customer for over 5 years too but that doesn't seem to matter, here it is anyway....

Dear Vodafone.

I am writing to complain about an ongoing issue that is still unresolved with the level of data usage on my phone.

I have now phoned up customer services 15 times (yes that’s FIFTEEN), taken my phone to a Vodafone store, phoned Sony Ericsson twice and sent my phone back to you to be repaired, and I still do not have a satisfactory resolution to my problem.

To explain fully; the phone is a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro and since around the beginning of December it has been receiving large volumes of data traffic, typically 50 - 100Mb per hour even when I am not doing anything on it i.e. It is sat on my desk in front of me all day.

As my data usage limit is 500Mb I am aware that I would be charged £5 per 500Mb extra if the phone continued to behave in this way.

Now my problem is that I do not know why the phone is constantly receiving data and there is now way on the phone of telling. Apart from 3G watchdog which I use to monitor the data traffic usage, there are no other applications installed on this phone other than those that it shipped from you with.

I have explained this to customer services and staff at the Vodafone shop now on numerous occasions but you do not appear to understand that whatever is responsible for causing the phone to receive a high volume of data traffic:-

1. It has not been initiated by myself
2. It is not caused by an application that I have installed since receiving the phone, because I haven't installed any
3. The level of traffic being received is not in any way normal. If you class 500Mb as unlimited (which is completely absurd by the way), my phone will receive that amount of data in less than one day.

What is happening when I speak to you is that I am being passed from department to department, being told it's a manufacture issue, then being told to take my phone to a Vodafone shop and they'll fix it (which they couldn’t). Each time I do I get told a different story, none of which are actually any use in resolving this problem.

I have removed the battery and SIM for over 30 mins and then put it back in but that has made no difference at all

I sent the phone back to you to be repaired. You sent it back claiming that it is fixed but it still behaves in the same way as it did before I sent it.

If you look at my bills you will see I have owned the phone since October and you will see that for the first two months of ownership that my data usage is approx 50Mb per month. This level of usage is what I would expect as I do not use the phone often but suddenly I 'm being told that I'm using more data than this an hour, something is clearly not right here.

All in all I am very dissatisfied and frustrated with the level of service I have received so far. This phone is not fit for the purpose it was designed for (what use is a smart phone that you have to switch the internet access off?) It is completely unacceptable therefore I am suggesting that you terminate my contract with immediate effect and with no charges made to my account.

After all, would you accept this level of service in 24 month contract? No, of course you wouldn't, so do something about it and stop fobbing me off.

I would appreciate it if someone would please contact me asap to disscuss this.

Yours Sincerely

MissKeith

Have you got your emails set to sync automatically? Have you got widgets such as news, weather or any social network sites on your home pages? You may find background data is turned on and the phone is downloading data of it's own accord. Most smart phones will do this as default so if this is the case, you will need to mess about with the settings.

toad2898

MissKeith wrote: »

Have you got your emails set to sync automatically? Have you got widgets such as news, weather or any social network sites on your home pages? You may find background data is turned on and the phone is downloading data of it's own accord. Most smart phones will do this as default so if this is the case, you will need to mess about with the settings.

Thanks for the reply.

A phone cannot recieve data "of its own accord". Some Application is responsible for it yet Vodafone cannot give the means/explanation or necessary access to the phone to enable me to find out what it is as they lock the phone down and install all their Crapware on it.

As I explained in the letter the phone is all set up as when I first got it and never had a problem then. I checked my settings against Two other X10 owners at work and we all have the same settings but they don't have the same problem I do.

Anyway as I have explained to Vodafone, how smart is a smart phone that you have to switch off half the functionality?? not fit for purpose I'd say

thanks again

candytwinkle

See the Vodaphone rep is replying to some emails so thought i'd bump yours up.

Not a fan of Vodaphone customer service myself.

Rusty!

Use Google's Picasa web albums? If so then the gallery will probably be syncing with that, and if you've got a lot of pictures it could be the cause.

Vodafone

Hi toad2898

I can understand your frustration with this ongoing situation.

In terms of the eForum, queries like this that are account specific are removed from our eForum as the team are unable to help without your account details. When this is done an email is sent right away to explain why the post was removed and they would request your account details so that they can help you as soon as they possibly can.

As you've mentioned that you've sent us emails, could you provide the reference number from one of the auto-replies? This will allow me to find your details and look into this for you.

In the meantime I would suggest putting your SIM in another phone and seeing if the same thing happens in case this is an error on the network.

As you mention this didn't happen when you originally got the phone, I assume you've tried having it reset to it's original settings to see if it continues (it's likely this was done as part of the repair process also). If not you can see how to do this here. If you do this make sure you back up any data you wish to keep first.

I hope to speak to you soon.

Kirsty
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK

toad2898

Thank you for your reply

I never received any sort reply from you online submission form. I mentioned this to a CSR when I phoned for the umpteenth time to be told that the message I'd sent was never recieved, how convenient. I would accept this had I sent the message from my own mail client but when it's submitted via your own website!! It doesn't matter now anyway I guess it's irrelevent.

Yes I have done a system restore/reset and when I sent the phone back I'm pretty sure this is what was done too.

I've put my SIM in an old phone but it's not a android phone so I'm not sure how this would tell you that there was an error on the network as the two phones transmit and receive data traffic completely differently.

Without sounding over-simplistic, wouldn't it be easier to remove the 500 Mb per month limit from my contract? After all it was sold to me as "unlimited" hey!! At least temporarily whilst I attempt to resolve this. I say "I" because I've been pretty much left with the task of sorting it out to myself after all.

This way Vodafone wont end up losing two customers when our contracts are up (the Mrs is on Voda too) and I will not have to resort to publicly criticising your company for all to see.

toad2898

I'm all sorted NO thanks to Vodafone UK, did it myself so I shall now assume the moral highground

When my contract's up it's bye bye vodafone, they have been as much use as a chocolate teapot and are clearly selling phones they cannot properly support, shocking.

Intasun32

toad2898 wrote: »

I posted this on Vodafone's e-forum in a number of their sub forums and unsurprisingly they removed it within minutes and e-mailed me directly. They won't be able to remove it from here though, I think people deserve to see this.........

@Toad2898,

Well done in that you have managed to sort out your problem without the help of the Vodafone Customer Service (?) department.

I can relate to your problem and your anger at how difficult it has been for for you as some years ago I found myself in a similar situation.

I too posted a thread on the VF eforum where my posts were deleted, edited and abused by 'first time posters' who seemed to be joining the forum by the scores to belittle my thread. Any reply I made to these posts were deleted, the abusive posts were allowed to stay. I eventually gave up, which was their intentions, but not before I warned and then finally blocked from the forum. I think even after all this time I still am!

I was happy to find open forums like MSE which allowed members to air their problems and take plenty of good advice from other knowledgeable members. This went a long way to help me bring my own troubles to a satisfactory conclusion. From a recent incident when replying to a thread, what worries me now is the growing influence that the VF forum team now seem to have on MSE with the consent of the Mods.

VF can edit and remove posts on their in house forum as it is understandable that they would not want any bad posts regarding their nework and service being made available for one and all to read. They only want to show how wonderful their network is. To have the same influence over MSE would be against everything that this forum has grown to be.

I hope the Mods take note and don't censor this post!!!! :rotfl:

:beer:

gjchester

toad2898 wrote: »

I'm all sorted NO thanks to Vodafone UK, did it myself so I shall now assume the moral highground

What was the issue?

toad2898

gjchester wrote: »

What was the issue?

The issue was as per the letter above. Too much data being received by the phone for no apparent reason.

In the end as VF were no use, most (but not all of the staff I must say) just fobbed me off with some ridiculous suggestions so I decided to root my phone. I re-moved all the pre-installed rubbish that vodafone put on the phone (such as the awful Vodafone 360 app) that it did not need in anyway to operate properly.

Since doing this the battery lasts longer and I can control completely everything that's installed the phone, no surprise that my daily data usage is now next to nothing even despite the fact I have Facebook, e-mail etc all syncing automatically. Basically the phone has never worked better than it does now.

As for potentially invalidaing my warranty, well I honestly don't care, given vodafone's helpfulness it isn't worth the paper it's written on anyway.

My message to vodafone would be:-

• Dont load your phones with pre-installed software that people do not want and certainly dont need and then prevent them from removing them

• Don't assume everyone who contacts customer services doesn't know how a smart phones works. I work in IT so I do know how they work and only wish I'd used a dictaphone to record the conversations I had with you given some of the stuff I was told.

For anyone else who has similar problems to what I've had on an android phone, I'll try and post on here what to say to customer services of any provider so they can't fob you off with what they tried on me.

Thanks