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[Bowdon]

Ofcom Hits Vodafone UK with Record £4.6m Fine for “Failing Customers”

The telecoms regulator has today hit “failing” UK mobile and broadband provider Vodafone with a “record” fine of £4,625,000 after they were found to have breached a series of consumer complaint handing rules. Ofcom’s investigation of the case uncovered a variety of serious mis-selling, inaccurate billing and poor complaints handling procedures.

Anybody paying attention to Ofcom’s quarterly consumer complaints report will know that Vodafone’s mobile business has been going through a particularly rough period and consistently managed to attract more gripes than any other UK network operator.

In keeping with that Ofcom has been busy conducting two investigations into Vodafone, one of which was looking at flaws in their complaints handling procedures and another of which had been examining the operator’s selling and billing practices for their pay-as-you-go services. Today was judgement day for both of those.

[kitz]

Not surprised.   CS was appalling late last year.   I think I may have mentioned in a few other posts that I was mis-sold something.... or rather offered a deal which they failed to honour and charged me full price. linky 
I put in a request for the call to be listened to, which they said they need to do, then they failed to act on within the required time period.
They were even failing to respond to notices sent to their Head Office, without which it makes 'deadlock' impossible so you cant then use the proper ADR system.

So a lot of people ended up going straight to OFCOM...  and there were a lot.  Their facebook page was full of people complaining that complaints were being ignored.
It took >three months for me to get it sorted.


   

[sevenlayermuddle]

I also had the most appalling experience last year, when I called to discuss an issue with data usage.  My call landed in India, then passed from pillar to post around different departments (all Indian), each one in turn blatantly fobbing me off in the hope that I'd give up.   Online chat was even worse, a complete waste of time. 

Worse than Demon, and I never thought I'd say that.  I wonder if maybe the Demon call centre was thrown in when Vodafone took them over?

Such a shame as I've been with Vodafone about 15 years and until not long ago, customer service was UK based and always pretty good.

[j0hn]

It still saddens me to see people say that about Demon. I used them for years on ADSL and they were the best ISP I ever used. I moved on before they sold up and support went offshore