Tom whom can I complain? (3)

cluuuuur

On Friday (18th) I agreed to a retentions deal with 3 - 400 mins, 700 texts, 25 picture messages for £35, with an N95. Naturally, it was worth a haggle, so I asked if that was the N95 8gb edition. To my shock, the adviser said that he would look into it and sort it out for me on this contract. I quickly agreed to the contract, and eagerly awaited my shiny new phone to arrive.

It came yesterday - standard N95. No 8gb model. Naturally, I rang 3. I was passed between 4 advisers, having to give my details out each time and the nature of my complaint, which got very wearing. The final guy I spoke to "offered" to either upgrade my mobile to the model I had been told I was getting for £130 (um, no thanks...) or change me onto a tariff which wouldn't meet my needs but would allow me to get the phone which I believed I was getting in the first place.

Wrote 3 an email last night expressing my displeasure with this, and the way I was being treated. They phoned me back today, and I may as well have had an action replay of yesterday's saga. I pointed out that they could always listen to the conversation I had originally had with the adviser on Friday "for quality and training purposes" - but apparently they don't actually record them! Therefore I have no evidence to back me up, and apparently this naturally puts me in the wrong.

I'd just like a goodwill gesture of some sort (either the mobile phone I was promised, or a reduction in tariff) to show that they're taking my complaint seriously. Instead I'm getting snotty replies from the advisers and a headache from hour-long phone conversations that go round in circles. All they want to tell me is how fantastic the deal I am getting is (fair enough, but it's not as fantastic as the deal I was led to believe I was getting!).

Who can I turn to next if 3 aren't listening? Any help would be greatly received.

Vomityspice

The Distance Selling Regulations gives you your way to resolve the matter;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Protection_(Distance_Selling)_Regulations_2000

Just phone up 3 and say, 'I am unhappy with what has happened so I am sending your phone back and canceling my contract with you under the Distance Selling Regulations'.

If they don't give you what you want, send the phone back and take your custom elsewhere.

If they want to keep you as a customer then watch them seriously try to resolve it. Only phone them once, and if they don't play ball, email your rejection of the phone and post it back the next day.

cluuuuur

I am now absolutely fuming with 3.

I managed to drop my old phone, so made the decision just to keep the N95 they had sent me. From the first moment I opened it, I had problems. It wasn't recognising phone numbers that had been stored in the memory when I got text messages, so it was showing purely the contact's number rather than names. It also made a high-pitched whistling sound while I was making calls.

It was suggested on another forum that updating the firmware might help resolve these issues, so I gave that a go. My laptp, however, didn't have enough memory to install the Nokia software required to do this (ha!). I trotted down to Phones 4 U on the offchance they could upgrade firmware for me. They advised me that 3's upgrades are usually refurbished phones - something which I had no idea about at the time.

Anyway, I rang 3 to complain about the faulty handset. They offered me a replacement, which I took so that I could further my investigation into this(!)

Handset arrived today. First thing I noticed is that it was in a completely different style box to the first one. The first one had no 3 branding on the box or phone, which the replacement does, but obviously had 3 software loaded. I also realised when I took the replacement out of the box that it had a lovely "new phone" smell to it - which had been lacking in the first one, but that I hadn't realised at the time. In the box I discovered information leaflets which hadn't been in the old one, the phone charger was bound up with one of those velcro thingies, whereas the first one had been held in its wrapped state with a plastic cable tie, and this second phone asked different things (my location, etc) when I first booted it up. I also discovered in the box a car charger, which hadn't been in the first one.

This leads me to believe that my new phone is indeed NEW, and that my first "new" phone had been a refurbished handset. I'm going to ring 3 tomorrow for an explaination (which I'm sure I'll just get a load of excuses for) but I thought I'd put a warning out to people about this for if you're going to get a "new" upgrade from 3.