Vodafone’s Black Friday Fiasco

Black Friday don’t you just love it?

For most people in the UK we go to the shops at about midnight and beat each other senseless just to get a heavily discounted tv which was over-priced anyway.

I sold a phone the day before and I had £150 burning a hole in my pocket. I was going to order a Motorola Moto G 2nd gen 5in, that was until I saw the LG G2 on offer from Vodafone for £150 as part of the Black Friday deal. I’ve had my eye that phone for quite a while and it would be rude to pass up on such a great deal. We spotted the deal on Saturday and went into my local Vodafone store to see if we could buy one, guess what? They were right out of stock, they said they had 6 in and they all went an hour before I arrived at the store.

We went home and this is where the fun started. I attempted to order one online and the first attempt didn’t go through because of the heavy traffic on the Vodafone website however I did manage to order one and I got a web order ref number. I duly got a text message saying they will update me on the order, that was over a week ago. Some people got texts messages giving progress reports but I must have ticked no text messages in my marketing preferences as I didn’t want to be hassled every week with offers.

Some people were lucky and got one either online or went to their local Vodafone store. I’ve heard reports that Vodafone were sending out refurbished handsets and passing them off as nearly new with earphones or manuals missing. Somebody even checked the warranty status and it had 6 months to run, so it had obviously been used and sent back. Someone reported that they received a refurbished handset and it was scratched. Vodafone had admitted there was a Quality Control issue (no shit Sherlock) and was told they could return the refurbished handsets.

 

It is now Monday 8th of December 10 whole day since I ordered it and have heard nothing. I’ve rang the Customer Services, emailed them I even mailed the CEO but nothing, they can’t tell anything. When I do get though via the web chat they have to call me back and then dumped in a queue for nearly an hour. They don’t seem capable of dealing with this issue.

 

Vodafone have acknowledged that they are having supply issues but have loads in their high street stores.

 

Why don’t they either issue a voucher to buy it at a Vodafone store or recall stock from stores to send out to waiting customers who have ordered this handset.

 

Am I going to get this handset this side of Christmas?

 

Australia offers refund to customers who bought the new iPad

Customers in Australia who bought the new iPad will be entitled to a refund because they were told that the new iPad would work on 4g LTE, however this doesn’t seem to be the case. The UK will have the same problem as radio frequency will set to US which is different to other countries.

The new iPad has also got problems with the batteries overheating and they can burn you put the device on your lap.

Full report below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/28/ipad-3-refunds-australia-4g

New Phone Hassle

It all started on Friday night browsing the internet and went to the What Mobile forum where I’ve been a member since December 2006. I post on there on a regular basis. I saw this offer Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700 for £40,  I told my partner Ursula and she said lets go for it. We went to bed.

We got up early had a shower and went for bus to Blackburn, went into O2 store and they had run out of that model of phone Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700. We had a look round the store but we couldn’t see it. We asked the sales assistant and she said it must have been an online offer by O2.

We left the store, walked round to Carphone Warehouse but it cost more than double than the O2 offer and decided we would go to nearby Accrington to see if we could buy it in-store so we got on the bus and travelled to Accrington we arrived and went into the O2 store, again asked and they didn’t have it in stock, I asked which local stores had them in stock, the assitant checked local stores but no O2 stores had any in. So we decided to go home and try and order them online from O2.

We got home I made some coffee and and something to eat, I then fired up my netbook went to look at the offer, and we saw on a different website that Carphone Warehouse would price match the offer.

This is where the fun and games started. I called Carphone Warehouse and after the operator saw the offer she asked her boss if she could price match it, they would but I would have to pay £10 topup, with the offer I didn’t need to topup, so I decided not to take up the offer because it  wasn’t really much of a price match.

So I went onto the O2 website and placed an order, Ursula attempted to do the same until her Visa Debit card started playing up, on Visa cards there’s an extra section to complete called verify by Visa and she couldn’t remember her password, it asked for example 7th, 10th 12th characters of her password.
Ursula then asked me if I could order it using my debit card, we have a joint bank account but it didn’t really matter who’s name it was in.

Ursula had an online chat with a sales advisor who advised her that the handset was completly unlocked and unbranded.

I placed my order and got a order acknowlegement by email and got one for Ursula too. On sunday I got an order confirmation with a order tracking number with DHL, I thought the other order would arrive by email too as the order was only ordered 3 minutes apart. When it became clear the 2nd email didn’t arrive Ursula went online to find out why only one of the orders was confirmed. O2 said that the email would arrive Monday. I kept going to the DHL website to track the progress of the order by putting in the tracking code. I went to bed, woke up on Monday morning and got up.

I switched  my netbook on and checked the status of my order at 1026 it was on the van out for delivery, at 1335 the intercom buzzer went off and I went down to sign for the parcel.

I brought the parcel upstairs and I opened the parcel took out the phone, assembled it and put in my 3uk simcard, and it asked for network unlock  code. So Ursula went straight back onto the O2 website to chat to an O2 Guru. We asked why had we been lied to, saying we was told it was an unlocked handset, and unless they were prepared to waive the unlock fee as it we given the wrong information. The man said it was not possible unless I was prepared to pay the £15 unlock fee-after  12 months. We were given a number to ring for returns. We also checked the status of Ursula’s phone and it turned out it was actually out of stock, despite being charged for 2 phones.

We rang the returns dept who said we could send the phone back because we hadn’t activated the phone via the O2 simcard.

We were given an address to send the phone back to, but were also told that the Post Office would give us a jiffy bag to send back, but the Post Office said no we had to pay for a jiffy bag. We returned home, again back onto the 0844 number, so we asked a bag to be sent , and they said they would send us one.

What really annoyed me was the way we were lied to and why did they deduct the payment before despatching the phone?

Do 3 really have the worst Customer Service?

According to Which magazine 3 mobile came bottom of the pile when it came to mobile phone’s network customer services coming in at 69th place. The winner was O2.

But we really need to examine as to why 3’s customer service is really that bad.

I personally have been a customer of 3 for 5 years and Ursula my partner has been a customer almost since day one.

The problems we’ve had have been everything from reception issues to faulty handsets to trying to obtain a PAC code.

On occasions we’ve been lied to maybe unintentionally, or the operator wasn’t aware of the facts.

The main problem is that although it is a UK company the call centre is based in Mumbai, India. There is sometimes a language barrier because the operator speaks very little English as I would imagine English would be their 2nd language.

They used to offer good value for money but these days they’re just like any other network.

Another thing that 3 do is lock the handsets in way that affects the operation of the handset. The 3g to 2g switch is disabled meaning if you live in a borderline 3g area your handset will not work. It will reboot the phone and sometimes you can’t even make call or send a text message. The operator will blame the handset and tell you to send the handset in for repair, but you know its not the handset – well it is kind of, its usually the firmware in the handset which has 3 branding, I always try to get the handset unlocked and get the generic firmware installed.

This last week we were in the last 30 days our the contracts.  We rang up to get our PAC codes which was a intention to leave the network and port the numbers to another network. It was like the Spanish inquisition why did we want to leave the network, we simply said we wanted an 18 month contract with a free handset (LG Optimus one) or (htc Wildfire) they said we could have either but would have to pay £80 upfront so we promply told them where to go, this went on for the past week.

We finally got a new contract a better deal than we’re already on. The girl in my local 3store used her own discount to get us the deal an HTC Wildfire which I am actually writing this blog on.

If 3 moved they’re much fabled call centre to the UK, who knows it might win an award for their customer services. But I would very much doubt it somehow.

Apples’s Big Annoucement

Yesterday I visited the Apple website and there was a blank screen with 4 clocks with the time they would make a big announcement at 3pm UK time.

I visited various forums and started a thread on the What Mobile Forum everybody who posted on my thread had different things to say. I saw in some forums it was to do with cloud storage where you subcribe (being Apple it wouldnt be cheap) where you either put you entire music collection onto the cloud based storage system or a Spotify where you pay a fee each month and have it’s entire catalogue at your disposal, basically you stream music to your phone but unless you buy the music off the site the music is only yours until you stop your paying it.

A lot of pundits said it was something to do iTunes acquiring the countries most famous group the Beatles back catalogue, I thought god I hope not, all that hype just for that.

Anyway 3pm came and went on Wednesday in the UK, at 3.12pm a picture of the fab four appeared on the front page of iTunes.

Imagine my and everybodies elses disappointment when we found out what all the hype was about.

iTunes/Apple on Facebook and on the forums got absolutely slated as the Apple said this would change everything trouble is they always say that.

What a bunch of Numpties Apple are.