I went to Mallorca over Christmas and did two things with my mobile phone which resulted in being billed, I think unfairly, by Vodafone. The first occurred on landing, I received an SMS from Vodafone ES telling me that I had a voicemail which I should pick up. I tried calling my voicemail number which had a recorded message saying that I could not listen to voicemail abroad. Result: me being charged for a roaming call.
The second is even more perverse. I have a Motorola phone which Vodafone have messed about with so that one of the key buttons always activates Vodafone Live with one press and without warning. The button can’t be re-programmed and you can’t access the GPRS settings. I regularly hit this button by mistake and have to cancel the connection. This is annoying in the UK but doesn’t cost anything. While in Mallorca I accidentally hit this button and activated a 3 second GPRS connection for which I was billed £1.50 because of roaming charges.
I strongly object to things like this which allow companies like Vodafone to make money. I am in the early stages of running a service company so I am also fascinated by how customer service deals with this kind of issue. I have had problems with Vodafone before where I have discovered billing errors. The last incident they had been billing me incorrectly for six months. When I called up they acknowledged the error on the current bill, I then asked them about the previous bill which they checked and found the same error. I then had to prompt them to look at the bill before that and suggest that maybe it was their duty to find out how long it had been going on for and refund me. I don’ t know if this is policy or their staff just not being on the ball but either way I felt annoyed that I had to help them give me my money back.
I noted that they have never pointed out a billing error to me and then tried to find out whether they would investigate whether I was the only person with this problem. My reasoning being that if they had 10m customers and had incorrectly billed 10% of them with 10% of my ‘refund’ they would have taken £6m in clear profit. The customer support person helpfully pointed out that globally they have 60m customers. So how easy does that make if for a company like Vodafone to make money which is not rightfully theirs? He then tried to persuade me that the UK billing system had to handle millions of customers and there were going to be errors. The phuser team have built a system which is designed to scale into the billions. All he seemed to be saying was that the Vodafone billing system QA team were not up to the job.
Assuming that Vodafone have some kind of company structure where certain people take certain responsibilities I wanted the name of the person responsible for making sure they would investigate whether they hadn’t incorrectly billed 1m other customers for £60 with the same fault as mine. What I found out from my investigation is that customer services are kept at arms length from the rest of Vodafone and it is very difficult to get to the inner core of Vodafone who might be able to answer this kind of question; you can however write a letter to an anonymous P.O. Box. I ran out of energy at that point and never wrote although I imagine you have received a carefully crafted response apologising and reassuring me that it was being taken care of.
Next: Mallorca Vodafone refunds
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