In May, my husband was doing a job in an area where he was getting really bad reception on his phone. He called to complain about it, they acknowledged that the area was in a bad spot but they were currently building new stuff to improve that area, and hey we'll give you a 50% discount for the next few months anyway. We're both on the same account so the discount applied to both of our phones.
Cool, a discount, right?! :D nope.
When we get the bill that first incorporates the discount (June) there's a $900 charge on it O_O looking through it THEY CANCELLED BOTH OUR CONTRACTS. My husband called them to find out wtf and the person he spoke to found that the person who put on the discount on basically fucked it up and changed our plan and as that plan doesn't cover the things we have on our current plan, it therefore cancelled our contracts instead.
She said she fixed the cancellation, and we only need to pay half of the usual bill as normal. Awesome.
So I paid what I roughly worked out as being half of the bill because I wasn't sure what it should be due to all the weird extra charges on the bill.
Here comes July, and we get the next bill. The discount is applied correctly. There's a credit back for the cancellation charges. But apparently we still owe money on the last bill. If anything, all I could work out is there should be a ~$5 difference that I missed on judging half, and certainly not the amount they say I still owe! Where is my discount if I'm still basically paying full price?! I go to access the previous bill to check it out. I can't. They've deleted it off their server with some weird way they send out the emailed bills so I can't look at it AT ALL. Great!
My husband calls Vodafone to ask about it. The guy he speaks to looks at it and says it's all correct. Not good enough, because it's not.
We go into a store and speak to an employee there, thinking that speaking to a live person in the flesh would make it easier to explain everything to. He takes our details and says he'll send off a complaint form on our behalf and he'll give us a call when he checks out our account. That was last Thursday and it's now nearing close of business Tuesday, and we've heard nothing back.
I got an SMS update yesterday demanding I pay the overdue amount RIGHT NOW!! My current bill isn't due yet, and I've not wanted to pay anything towards it right now until this is sorted out because the money I pay will end up going to towards this payment I don't owe.
My husband calls Vodafone again and puts me on the phone to deal with it this time. I speak to the guy who says he can see our previous bill and the discount is on there just fine. Rude I know, but I tell them that I don't exactly trust him since *I* can't see the bill and all the staff we speak to seem to not understand our bill is wrong.
I ask how, if there's a 50% discount, why is the amount I paid + what they say I still owes = a full price bill. I wasn't owing anything on the previous bill, so it's not carried over from previous months, these are fresh charges from June. He tells me he doesn't know but it's right because "the discount is there, he can see it". He offers to email the bill out to us since we can't access it, which I've just received (he warned it could take up to 24 hours).
I've been looking at the bill with my trusty calculator and it's definitely wrong. There is infact a discount applied on there, however according to the last bill, the cancellation fee came to ~$897. The credit back to fix that on the current bill was only ~$803. $90 difference! Guess how much they say I still owe on the previous bill? $90!
I have a friend who used to work for a telco, and discussing it with her, it seems like last month our contract was still $X to cancel, but in the next month, the contract amount went down a month's worth, making it $Y and when they fixed the bill, they didn't check the exact amount to credit back, but just generically credited back the contract owing. Which of course is a month out.
I'm rather annoyed that, ok, so the discount I thought was missing actually wasn't, but that they never offered to look into why exactly I still had to pay full price for my bill and not the half I have been offered! Since they could see the bill, they could have looked at it properly to determine that something's not right when we had said it's wrong and doesn't add up - and it's not hard to miss when on one bill I'm charged $X but the next I'm only offered $Y back!
So I've just called them myself and spoke to a woman about it. According to her, nothing was wrong because the cancellation was credited back! Yes, but the numbers are wrong! Our call then got disconnected half way through our conversation grrr.
I called back and got someone else. Explained the problem again, explained how the amounts are wrong to him at least twice then I could hear that he had a calculator there (he was talking to himself while he entered the numbers in) and then I heard "Ooohhhhh yeah". SUCCESS. Finally acknowledgement that it's wrong, and he fixed that up.
I was talking to my friend I mentioned earlier on MSN while I was on the phone, and on hold, and she told me to ask for a discount for the fuck around, which I did and he offered another $10 off the whole total once he worked out the correct amount. It's going to take up to 48 hours for the correct amount to reflect in their billing system, so we'll have to wait and see if this actually goes through correctly now, and hopefully it won't mess up any future bills since applying a discount and fixing a fuck up is what's left this in such a mess to begin with -.-
It's been 2 months dealing with this billing error and it shouldn't have take over a week of calling and visiting stores to actually get someone to look at the numbers to find out it's wrong AGAIN :/ had I have been able to even access the previous bill like I should be able to, I myself could have found the exact error so i think it's sucky they delete the bills. They used to actually attach them to the emails, now it seems like it's just a link to their server :S Note to self: start saving bills to hard drive.
It's annoying that instead of getting to enjoy having half price bills for a few months, that we've spent most of the doscounted time stressed/worried about the extra charges they're trying to make us pay!
This has frustrated me because it's not the first time we've had a problem with their billing. I used to pay a set amount each week onto the bill when we got paid through electronic billing. One time on my bill, it charged us extra for a "Bpay error" (Bpay being online billing). After calling them to find out what this meant, they said that Bpay had put a charge through twice (but it had only come out of my account once) so they were charging me the extra that I didn't really pay towards my bill
Why?! It wasn't my fault, and had nothing to do with me as it was an error on Bpay-Vodafone's end, not mine, so they should be contacting the Bpay service about it, not me! I ignored the charge, and it ended up dropping off my next bill, luckily :/