Misled into signing Kabenanschluss contract

[antonkoh]

Hello,

I am having a frustrating situation with a customer support representative on WhatsApp and was hoping someone here could help me, because I only had good experiences with customer support here.

Back in April I received an email from a Vodafone Mitarbeiter saying that as a holder of an internet contract, the contract for Kabelanschluss would be free for me. At the same time I received the contract for confirmation in a separate email and confirmed it, since after several years with Vodafone I chose to rely on the words of the employee. I'm not fluent in German, but the email said pretty clearly:

The numbers in the contract also made me assume that all costs are 0. Unfortunately, I did not read into the text that said that it's only free until some moment in the future:

I also received a Bestellbestatigung that said that confirmed all Gestamtkosten as 0, so I was confident everything is OK.

So in July I got charged for the first time and reached out to support at WhatsApp and the person there basically gaslighted me saying that whatever they wrote in the email doesn't matter and no one cares about this.

I believe that this is an unethical attitude to a customer who has many contracts with Vodafone for several years, and I hoped to get some clarity about why the email misled me. Unless this was intentional, which based on the behavior of that customer support agent, it is.

Thanks for any support or advice

Anton

@antonkoh: Post moved to correct board. BR Chr1ssy

[Peter_Co]

The problem is exactly that you did not read that one very important point. Up to now you paid the basic connection via to your landlord via the utility/additional costs bill, who had a contract with Vodafone and forwarded the money to them. Due to the law changing at July 1st, this kind of collective billing isn‘t allowed anymore, and all the customers now have to pay the base price by themselves directly tomVodafone  - in case of Vodafone it is called TV Connect (which btw you only need if you actually watch cable TV, too - if you only use the internet you don‘t need that). Vodafone was interested in binding these customers early and not losing them to IPTV or other ways of broadcast, so they offered TV Connect early, even if the contract with the landlord was still running. Up to the actual date of the landlord contract ending TV Connect was free, but from the point Vodafone not getting money from the landlord anymore they started charging the individual customer. Depending on the conditions your landlord had with Vodafone you might have to pay a few Euro more now for the individual contract.

While the selling behaviour of the phone agents (who live from provisions) is questionable, with the written confirmation you could have known that this offer would not be unlimited. I doubt that Vodafone will do anything about it.

[antonkoh]

Yes, thank you.

I understood what the contract has to do with now.

I'm just surprised that such behavior of the colleague who sent this email (which was signed not by a sales agent, but by a "technical support" rep, by the way) is acceptable.

I thought the further customer support at WhatsApp would at least accept that the "urgent" information they sent was untruthful and at least apologize, try to make it up to me somehow, but I received so much blame and passive aggression instead, after many rather peaceful years, it's just a shame.

[Peter_Co]

Sadly you will find that behaviour everywhere when it comes to selling and to beating the competition. For months this scaremongering went through all the media, done by all the competitors. „You have to act now!“ - „You might end with a black screen!“ and so on.