The Vodafone UK billing fiasco has been running so long that I lose track of when it began. But Ofcom, the UK’s comms regulator, helpfully pointed out the duration in their latest update about customer complaints.
…Ofcom received the most complaints per 100,000 subscribers about Vodafone for the eighth quarter running.
Though Vodafone managed to achieve record-breaking levels of complaint in previous quarters, the number of protesting customers is clearly on a downward path, as obvious from the graph above. But that still leaves them with three times as many complaints as the average for the postpaid mobile sector, and more than twice as many complaints as the next worst performers.
Ofcom’s scanty report once again states that the leading driver of Vodafone complaints is issues with billing, pricing and charging. It does not take a genius to infer the enormous wave of customer complaints stemmed from mistakes made during a major billing migration that occurred two years ago. Amazingly, Vodafone UK were never punished for overcharging customers, though they received a multi-million dollar fine for not responding adequately to the resulting complaints. That is a bit like jailing a thief not for his original crime but because he was slow to return the stolen goods.
Merry Christmas to all Vodafone UK customers. Your bills are still much more likely to be wrong, but not as likely to be wrong as previously!
