I have been a Vodafone Romania prepay customer since 2001 and switched to postpay since 2004.
We’ve been together though a green-to-red rebranding, I’ve seen management changes,services outsourced,customer case worsening and failure to keep up with competition on both pricing and quality of the service.
Despite all that, I chose to stay with them for apparently no good reason. Back in the summer of 2007 they had this great offer which was ok with my communication needs and was halfpriced.So I took it. In august this year, the offer expired and they started charging me an outrageously EUR 25 for 200 national minutes pulling my average bill to about EUR 110/month. Now, this may seem little but you should consider the fact that in Romania, these telecom companies sell prepay minutes for nothing. I had such a prepay myself which gave me for EUR 4 : 800 in-network minutes , 800 in-network texts and 150 minutes which I could use to call anyone in the country or any fix phone in Europe.
Put the 4 near the contractual 100+ and see the diference.
Few days ago I tried for the last time to settle for a more decent score for Vodafone’s services. My last triout was blown away by one of their own employees who, funny enough, should be a user retention expert. This lady named Liliana L, managed to destroy the very last bit of chemistry existing between me and her company.
I’m not going to give out more details, I’ll just republish a guideline Vodafone seems to be following in every single step. Oh, there’s little adjustments to the guideline just to fit the situation.
1. Ignore your customers.
I don’t know the province stores, but enter any Vodafone shop in the heart of Bucharest. Only after standing in a stupid queue for more then 15 minutes, you will be taken care of by an employee. Who, if it happens to be past noon is so sick and tired that will either shout or make you feel like crap.
2. Lie to your customers.
Tell them about data coverage. Show them a map that’s extensively modified by sales people. Tell them you’ve got HSDPA coverage allover center when in fact you don’t. I’ve been playing around with my netbook open and I can tell you the areas in Bucharest city center where you actually can connect at 21.6 Mbps are just a quarter of the advertised space.
3. Sell your customers crap.
Sell them untested, unsupported Huawei devices. ‘Cause they’re cheap. Make them pay big bucks. I paid EUR20 for a 21Mbps modem even though i had commitment for 2 years. Which heated like hell from the very first plug in. And which I had to take to service after only 3 weeks of usage.
4. Don’t make things right when you should.
On launch day of your product, after numerous press releases, don’t have things ready. Tell your customer he has to sign a hand-made contract made out of a contract with lower bandwidth included. because the ABO intranet application is not willing to access the current offer.
5. Treat your customers badly.
Then, disable the service after only 2 days since your initial traffic was so small that it ran out on my regular usage and 48hours were apparently not enough to make the changes. ***
After that, tell him he cannot actually get what he contractually signed until the end of the current billing cycle.
6. Treat your employees badly.
See point #1. I’ve got at least 5 emails notifying them there were NOT ENOUGH EMPLOYEES HANDLING THE CUSTOMERS IN THE RESPECTIVE SHOPS. After 6 months, who dares tell me those did not hit the Junkbox.
7. Don’t listen to your customers.
See point #1. Oh and.. you’ve got Social Media campaigns. Online stuff. When someone writes some feedback make sure you ignore and don’t comment. Who the hell would care what this customer is writing about?
8. Stop caring about your customers.
So what if this EUR100/month dude goes away? We’ve got plenty others to take the money from!
9. Copy your competitors.
… in the worse possible scenarios. Power to you! limited at 25MB traffic/month. In the era of broadband and IPhone and Android. Have your telemarketers call me to sell 25MB traffic for EUR 4.5 when I keep shouting the half Gigabyte is not enough.
Oh, and make sure your telemarketers are not IT-savy. So that they ask me “How much is that half gigabyte? Is it substantially more then the 25 MB?”
10. Convince yourself that anyone gives a flip about you or what you have to say.
After all you’re a big brand. People should care about you, should praise you, right?
That concludes it. At the time being I’m sending out the final papers cutting most of my services and the rest I’m still committed with will follow in January upon expiring.
If you’ve been so patient and read so far, you must be really interested in understanding others’ mistakes. So I’m opening up an auction:
- If you’re a mobile operator representative, send me an offer. My communication needs are below
- If you’re a natural person, let me know about your good choice that is close to my communication needs. If I find it really interesting, and I’m subscribing for 1 or 2 years I’ll be giving you the opportunity to get any phone or data device in the operator’s offer at discounted price corresponding to the price class of my subscription.
Here are my monthly communication needs:
250 national minutes regardless the network I’m calling in
100 minutes for calling exclusively in Vodafone
100 minutes for international fix outbound
no texts ( we’re in 2009 for chrissake )
at least 1 Gb Mobile data transfer. (3G or EDGE)
about 20 GB @ HSDPA+ speed
*** Many thanks to B, the Vf employee who was kind enough to come to work every day and reset my usage counter until the billing cycle expired.
