Some of you may have seen the post on my experiences switching from Orcon to Vodafone.

A brief summary – A couple of months ago I switched from Orcon to Vodafone to save money. It should have been a simple process, yet Vodafone managed to screw up almost every part. First was a week with no ADSL, then it went from working, then slow, then not at all. A quick blog post later and find myself ‘escalated’ and receiving daily telephone updates. I did feel there was finally a person genuinely making sure things were being actioned. These calls were always pleasant and generally ending with a big apology from the other end.
Of course I still had to wait over 4 weeks to finally have my line setup as I originally signed up for – or so I thought.

Last week, my mother started claiming that she tried to call me at home but could get through – I just accused her of being crazy and proved her wrong by calling the line via my mobile while I skyped her – no problem.

Now fast forward  to last week, I get a call from my flatmate –
“Is there any reason the home phone would be disconnected?” he asked.
Nope. Bill was good. Conveniently I was at my parents at the time so I tried the line. Weird tones.
We did indeed have no incoming line as my mother thought but also no outgoing either. Super.
By the time I got back our ADSL connection started constantly going up and down. Sometimes it would stay up for hours but more often it would just reconnected every 15mins or so.

A quick call to Vodafone Monday morning and thanks to it being a fault in the landline along with the ADSL, I wasn’t forced to jump through the usual morons check list.
Fault Lodged.
Chorus would be in touch within 24hrs – and Indeed they were.
By 4pm Chorus had been in touch, the man asked a few questions and then said he’d call me right back, which he did.
“It seems theres no problem with your line. The problem is caused by something wrong at Vodafones end. Although calls from their network will go through, people calling from Telecoms network can’t connect properly. Your line has some porting issues.”

I have now leant that from the day Vodafone started supplying my phone services chances are no one with a Telecom based service, and I suspect any provider using their wholesale network, have never been able to call my land line.

It makes it all the more annoying that when Chorus were proactive and called me back, Vodafone couldn’t muster up a similar level of customer service. The Chorus person worked on it on the Monday – yet by Friday I still hadn’t heard anything back from Vodafone.
This was last night – as usual they stuck me on hold for 5 minutes and came back claiming they would need to re-lodge the fault again.
“Why?” I ask “It hasn’t been fixed the first time.”
For some reason my last fault, although and being actioned, went nowhere.

This whole process makes me wonder once again if there is some big issues with the processes inside Vodafone. I understand they are a big corporation and you will always get anomalies and get weird customer setups but I’ve found that almost every step of this switch looks to have been done incorrectly or done in a half arsed or short-cut way.

I find it quite impressive that a telecommunications company don’t use it’s own services and actively call someone back. It’s quite infuriating to have the Chorus guy call me back and then pass it to Vodafone to fix but then never have them call me. Why is there not a process to instigate a callback to tell the client what’s going on? It doesn’t have to be the specific person techie but at least someone from customer support.

UPDATE (Saturday 17)
I just received the following txt from Vodafone – apparently there’s nothing wrong.
Yet my ADSL connection just reset, only minutes after I received the txt.
Of course this is Vodafone we’re talking about  – I’ll have to call them.

UPDATE 2 (Monday 19)
Heres a few screen caps of my modems ADSL connection speeds for random points over the weekend and this morning….. No fault was found…… crap.

UPDATE 3 (Monday 19)
So I just called the help line to find out where we were at and am told that ‘Only July 16 a technician looked into it and there is no fault.” Strange that I only was sent the txt on the 17th. Why didn’t they txt straight away? Did they even check?
The next logical step for Vodafones phone person was to just start the hoop jumping game fresh – “Can I ask you to disconnect any phones in the house….”
I’m over it. I finished that call and then call straight back.
“Put me through to Escalations.”

UPDATE 4 (Monday 19)
Conveniently the out of country call centre just couldn’t handle my request to be connected with escalations and instead put me through to the person who looked at my fault – against the guidelines.
The funny thing was it was exactly the person I needed to talk to, and a after a civil and actually productive conversation he saw that although things looked fine – there was a much bigger problem. 140 disconnects in a 24 hour period is apparently not normal…. no shit. He did everything he could and has organised another Chorus tech (again) to come look at the line today (Tuesday)

It’s so incredibly frustrating that the internet has been broken for 2 weeks, the landline for 2+ months and that I’ve had to lodge 3+ faults until I finally talk to someone who can actually fix it.