Dear Vodacom
I am frustrated. I do not understand what you mean when you talk about “Customer Care”.
Last night (27 October 2016), I lost about R43 worth of airtime. But let me go back a few hours.
In the afternoon, about 15:00, I needed to buy data. Vodacom used to know what I love. There used to be an offer to be able to buy 100MB data for the day until 23:59 (which I already think is a reason to use #datamustfall – sorry, that is how I feel!). That offer seems to have fallen away. The “best offer” these days seems to be R15 for 200MB for the day until 23:59. So I bought that. Before using the data, I wanted to make sure that I received it. So I checked my balance via *100#. I saw I had about R45 airtime and 200MB data. (I say “about R45”, because I remember the R45 part; it could have been R45,15 or R45,41 or whatever).
I switched on my data, and downloaded what I needed, including to documents of over 500 pages. I switched it off straight afterward. Later in the day I downloaded a book. All these I did on my tablet, using my data on my phone, by using my phone as a hotspot. I did also make a call of less that 60 seconds.
I checked my data after all of this, and saw I still I had about R43 airtime left, as well as about 123MB.
Now, as I stated, I bought 200MB for R15. I wasn’t about to not use all my data, or at least 175 of the 200MB. I do not like to waste, in effect, R8-something on data that I did not use.
So I checked whether I still had data left. I did have some data left, about 118MB, as well as those R43-something airtime.
I switched on my mobile data, and turned my hotspot on. And downloaded three small documents, not even 20 pages, and saved some Wikipedia pages. All the while, I kept checking when I received that SMS that says “you have less than ??MB data left”.
When I got the message that I have less than 30MB left, I did three things. I checked my balance again. I still had that, about R43 airtime and about 28.50MB left. So the message wasn’t wrong. Then I switched off my hotspot and then my mobile data option.
I wanted to make sure that it was off, so I checked my data again. I saw that I have R0 airtime and 5.00MB left.
I would like to know: How is this possible? How did I loose more than R40 airtime, and still have data left? How did I loose all that, even though I switched off my hotspot and mobile data after I received that message that I still had about 30MB left?
Yesterday isn’t the first time that something like this happens.
About two weeks ago, a similar thing occurred. I even sent a complain to your Facebook page, someone replied to me to write an email, and I received correspondence back. Of course, it appeared to be my mistake, as usual. [I have come to realize that Vodacom is never wrong.]
For yesterday’s incident, I have this service request number: A2-1XFB-LSE148 [One of the reasons I will be posting this on my Facebook, WordPress, and writing to media, is because the amazing promise that I will have to wait up to 2 working days for work being done; tomorrow is weekend, so if this isn’t resolved by tomorrow, that will mean I will have to wait for 4 days, IF the problem might be solved by Monday.)
I have a reference number for the email correspondence as well: 001F9aBYXDGQ57NC.
About three weeks ago, I had a similar issue again. Unfortunately, that issue wasn’t logged, since I didn’t ask for a service request number. In fact, when I was talking to the “Customer Care” agent last night, she couldn’t even find a call log for that time.
I am only a small customer. So I guess you will not go through a lot of trouble with this.
In fact, I predict that someone, somewhere in your “Customer Care” department will find a way to tell me that I am, in effect, the reason why I loose my airtime in this way. You will find a way not to be responsible – even if I checked my balances throughout the time I was using my data.
I will be posting this on my blog, and share a link to it on my Facebook. I am saying this merely for your knowledge, since I would like to have people know about the way you take airtime from customers.
I wanted to type “Kind Regards”, as is the norm in letters, but that would not be true.
Freddie
Freddie's Coffeebar Blog 