Ridiculed in Vodafone store (St Helens) by manageress.

jden

I have had a really bad experience with the manager at the Vodafone store in St Helens..... (Sat 18th June)
It is upsetting to be told your fingers are too fat (I am 5ft 9 inches tall and 13 stone!) and that you are too stupid to operate a touchscreen......

Dear Mr Hoencamp, (CEO of Vodafone)
I am writing to express my concerns about a recent incident I experienced at your St Helens store. I would like to bring to your attention the fact that I received extremely poor customer service and was publicly demeaned during my visit to the St Helens store by the store Manager [Removed], which took place on Saturday 18th June 2016 at approximately 12.00 noon

I have a nearly new Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 (5 months old) which has recently not been functioning correctly. I had previously contacted Vodafone and they advised me to take it to the local store where they would resolve the issue. On arrival I explained the issue (inability to select certain characters from the touchscreen and difficulty swiping the screen which is often unresponsive) and the manager immediately concluded that it was my inability to use the phone correctly and said that my fingers are too fat and that I should rotate the screen to landscape mode.

I pointed out that my fingers were no “fatter” than any normal persons and demonstrated that some characters were impossible to select reliably. Her colleague confirmed this was the case after trying the phone herself. I explained that I had deleted all recent apps which may have caused the issue, installed a third party keyboard and performed a factory reset but the problem was still evident. I am a confident and IT literate user who has worked in the IT industry for many years.

The fault is intermittent but it was successfully reproduced on numerous occasions as I demonstrated the fault. The manageress refused to accept that I had a genuine complaint and suggested it was user error and that she would send the phone away but that there was nothing wrong with it and that I could not have a temporary replacement. I once again attempted to convince her that the fault was genuine but on this occasion the character typed properly, as it should. She scoffed and rolled her eyes making me feel like a fool in front of a shop full of customers and vodafone staff. I complained about her attitude and pointed out that I have been a Vodafone customer for a decade and have worked in IT for many years. I confirmed that I have been using the phone for many months with no issues and I was aware of how to use a touchscreen and that the problem with typing had only occurred in the last few days.

She [Removed] was extremely condescending and made me feel very uncomfortable and upset.

I again, assured her that there was a fault and successfully demonstrated that it was impossible to type the character “C” and suggested her colleague try for herself, which she did and confirmed that it was impossible to type that character and indeed confirmed that swiping was erratic and unreliable. She suggested that it needed to be sent away for repair and that a replacement phone would not be made available to me. The manager then retired to the back room and her colleague took over and was very helpful and professional.

I am now without a phone for up to 10 days and concerned that the problem will not be taken seriously by the engineers and treated as “user error”.

I have never been treated in such a shoddy and disrespectful way and it has left me very upset and disappointed.


I hope to hear back from you about this incident soon. Please contact at your earliest convenience, email only I am afraid as I do not have a phone now.


Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.


Sincerely,

Vodafone

Hello jden,

I'm sorry to hear about the experience you've had in our store.

So that this can be looked into, I've forwarded your message to the store in question.

If you would like this looked into further, please contact us via the form available here.

Thanks,

Sarah

Social Media Operations

Vodafone UK

Comstock

This, if true, is awful. I hope the person concerned gets a rollicking at a minimum, and preferably demoted.

Making reference to someones size or weight in this way to belittle them should be as unacceptable as referring to their race or skin colour.

Hope the OP gets this sorted.

dazzaofdagenham

All Vodafone shops should be shut down until they sort there problems out

Exemplar

All customers should be made to pass a test before getting smart phones.

GingerBob_3

dazzaofdagenham wrote: »

All Vodafone shops should be shut down until they sort there problems out

Yes, SHOPS, not STORES. Where does this stupid notion of "stores" come from (as if I didn't know!). Went into Costa the other day to see they refer to their premises as a "coffee store".


Anyway, hope you get it sorted. Vodafone, like most other providers still haven't cottoned on to the "customer is always right" mentality.

Addicks_forever

So its not just the call centres that give shoddy service.

pmduk

GingerBob wrote: »

Anyway, hope you get it sorted. Vodafone, like most other providers still haven't cottoned on to the "customer is always right" mentality.

Anyone who has spent time working with customers knows that they are very often NOT right. However, the circumstances described by the OP sound unforgiveable.

mobilejunkie

Anyone who has spent time dealing with Vodafone in the last 3 or 4 years knows that Vodafone are ALWAYS wrong.

GingerBob_3

pmduk wrote: »

Anyone who has spent time working with customers knows that they are very often NOT right. However, the circumstances described by the OP sound unforgiveable.

It is irrelevant whether they are actually right or wrong, and I would suggest "very often NOT" is overstating it a bit. "Sometimes NOT" would probably be more accurate. However, people who interact with customers need to understand that the starting, default, situation is that the customer IS right, and take it from there. Businesses who don't adopt such a stance ultimately have to mend their ways, or they go to the wall.

Astraeus

I would like to know where the OP would put the quotation marks when describing what it was that was said to her. I am disinclined to believe anyone in a customer services role at a mainstream retailer would say "your fingers are too fat". What I wonder is whether the comment was actually, "some people struggle owing to the size of their fingers in which case it might help you to try landscape orientation". That, I can believe, because it is exactly what I have had to do to use my phone effectively given my monstrously large mitts.