Vodafone Contract problem - been misold new contract

melanie858

I have been a vodafone customer for years and a couple of months ago renewed my contract to keep the same price plan with a new HTC Wildfire S for £15 per month. I was told on the phone this price would be with a discount applied, which was similar to what I had been paying for the previous 2 years. In fact the man even said to me he was going to add a further discount to mean I was paying £15 per month rather than £16 I was paying before.

However looking at my bills they have been charging me the full £31 per month rather than the agreed £15 per month - basically not applying the agreed discount. For a contract giving me just 150mins/500 texts and a fairly basic smart phone I'm certainly not happy to pay £31 for that - twice what I was paying before!

I contacted Vodafone by email about the mistake and this is there response:

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Thank you for contacting Vodafone Customer Services in regards to price plan.

On reviewing your account, I would like to confirm that you have a price plan which comes with 150 minutes, 500 texts, Vodafone Mobile Internet and Vodafone Passport for line rental of £25.83 (excluding VAT). Please note that the price plan is effective from 25/03/2010. There was a discount of £11.91 applied on the price plan till 27/09/2011.

Additionally, I can see that your contract has renewed and new contract start date is 19/10/2011 and end date is 18/10/2013. There is no change in your price plan. If you have proof that you have offered a price plan of £15, kindly write back to us with the proof.

I trust above information helps.[/FONT]

How am I supposed to offer proof of the agreed £15 price plan when this was agreed over the phone? I'm not sure what to do now as I've been misold my new contract - not sure how I should respond to this? I can't afford a £31 per month contract - I've never paid more than £16 per month before.

Any help?

grumbler

It's very typical for Vodafone not to deliver what was offered over a phone. As a rule you have to get everything from them in writhing before agreeing to anything and/or record all important telephone calls.
Unless they have the record and you can make them to find it, you can only keep complaining to Vodafone, then to the ombudsman if they keep fobbing you off (this is exactly what they are doing now by asking you for the proofs instead of checking their records first).

And it's a shameless day time robbery to charge 24x£31 for Wildfire S with 150 minutes.
It costs 24x£15 at '3' with 500 minutes, 24x£20.42 at T-mobile with 600 minutes.

melanie858

grumbler wrote: »

It's very typical for Vodafone not to deliver what was offered over a phone. As a rule you have to get everything from them in writhing before agreeing to anything and/or record all important telephone calls.
Unless they have the record and you can make them to find it, you can only keep complaining to Vodafone, then to the ombudsman if they keep fobbing you off (this is exactly what they are doing now by asking you for the proofs instead of checking their records first).

And it's a shameless day time robbery to charge 24x£31 for Wildfire S with 150 minutes.
It costs 24x£15 at '3' with 500 minutes, 24x£20.42 at T-mobile with 600 minutes.

Thank you. I'm frustrated I didn't think to record the phone call, but to be honest it came when I wasn't expecting and it's not something I thought about doing. There's no way I would pay £31 for what I'm getting so I'm extremely upset about this!

grumbler

melanie858 wrote: »

Thank you. I'm frustrated I didn't think to record the phone call, but to be honest it came when I wasn't expecting and it's not something I thought about doing.

The second rule is that you will never get a good deal from anyone cold-calling you. And this rule applies to all cold calls, not only from Voda.

There's no way I would pay £31 for what I'm getting so I'm extremely upset about this!

Well, unless you don't care about your credit history, not much you can do besides complaining and demanding the record of the call to be found.

latecomer

Phone up and say you never agreed to anything and you believe this has been done fraudulently. Say you will return the phone and terminate your existing contract - then see how long it takes for them to find a full transcript of the conversation in their archives

melanie858

Thanks to the really kind Heidi from the Web Relations Team my problem has now all be resolved. She saw that the discount was noted on my record just hadn't been applied to my account. She also apologised for the really unhelpful email the customer services had sent me, and that he had ignored the notes on my account about the discount!

ruggedtoast

Glad you got it sorted out. The email you got was from Vodafone's Asian 'service' centre.

In my experience there is no point whatsoever emailing them, all replies take days to receive a cut and paste answer which invariably completely fails to address your initial enquiry. Even when they say they have done something they haven't, they literally cannot to anything.

Vodafone

Hi melanie858,

Really pleased I could help you out.

If you need anything else, feel free to get back in touch with me.

Kind regards,

Heidi
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK