Hello,
I apologize in advance as I am only able to speak and right fluently enough in English, so this post will be in English as a result.
I've been using Vodafone DSL for little over 2 years, and until recently it's been good.
However recently I was constantly getting small disconnects here and there, and had to call again and again and often with the help of a German coworker to speak to customer support to fix my problem.
Just under two weeks ago on an evening however, my internet completely broke down. I tried calling customer support multiple times only to find out that none of them spoke English, and all of them refused to redirect me to someone who does speak English. I spent several hours calling again and again until I finally got someone who spoke English to note my problem down, and he said there will be a technician checking my line next day.
The said technician never showed up, despite waiting at home for the full 6 hours the technician was scheduled to show up.
The upcoming week was an absolute nightmare of me relying upon my coworkers, hours at times, trying to get a hold of a representative to reschedule again and again for a technician to show up at my place to check the status of my internet, along with several more calls trying to get a hold of someone to activate my GigaGarantee data sim. I had to reschedule the technician visit 3 different times, because the person failed to show up at the appointed time.
An entire week has passed by before the technician showed up, did a check on my line and told me that the line was fine on his end, and that it may be a faulty modem that's causing the issue.
I called the customer support line right away to relay what the technician has said, and the person on the other side (English speaking customer support person, bless his soul!) said that it's already in the record and the technician will be contacting us within 24 to 48 hours after verifying on their side if it is a line issue or not.
Well, the technician did call at the tail end of the 48 hours mark, to verify what the technician has said, from me. It was obvious that my phone call from two days ago to tell them the exact same thing was completely lost in the process. I was furious, but at least the person said that a new replacement modem will be on its way and will arrive at my place in 2 to 3 days.
Three days past, and now on the eve of the 12th day without internet, I'm sitting here with an email from them that the replacement modem is finally being sent out. No doubt it'll take another two or three days before it actually gets to my place.
Given all of the above, the GigaGarantee data will run out soon (either in 4 days or within 10GB spending), and I spent another several hours of mine and my coworker's time trying to get more data loaded onto the sim card so that I won't be left without internet over the weekend, to no avail.The customer representatives kept sending us between the DSL technical support and the Call Ya customer support, with neither willing to help me with getting the data into the sim card.
So here I am, 12 days without internet, with by far the worst customer support experience I've had in a very long while. With the background above, the questions and comments I have are:
- Please, please, please, stop telling your customers to say "Operator" on the automatic call system to get an English speaking person, because it does not work. After 20th or so times I've been told that, and trying it again and again only to find out it still doesn't work, I feel very insulted now whenever someone on the phone tells me that.
- What happened to all the English speaking customer support representatives? Two years ago I chose Vodafone in the first place was because it had great English-speaking people in the customer support. Now 9 out of 10 times the person on the other side does not speak a word of English, and they usually sound smug about refusing my attempt to get someone who speaks English.
- What does it take for me to get a renewed data bundle for GigaGarantee? I have an active GigaGarantee 50 GB data bundle on my sim, which has about 10 GB and 4 days left on its time and I want this refreshed before weekend. Half the customer support person I talked to assures me that as soon as I get an SMS from Vodafone I just need to activate it through the link it sends, except the link points to https://center.vodafone.de and that website only shows me my current data bundle usage and time remaining, nothing else of use. There is no way to check if there will be a new data bundle available when I finish using the existing bundle.
Please, help me. These last few months I have lost so much faith in Vodafone's customer support, and if this keeps up I will have no choice but to just switch provider and never look back.
