After 15 years it's goodbye to poor service

Due to numerous incidents of poor service when my cell phone contract ended I decided to go prepaid and will migrate to another service provider. on 29/9/2015 I called the call centre to arrange to migrate to prepaid. I was given a reference number. Today I went into a MTN store to follow up on the date when the change would take place and to buy data ad airtime. I was astonished to find out that there appeared to be no record of the request. I was advised to phone 808. This I did and gave the agent my reference number. She then told meI would have to phone on the termination date to request the change...she said a request can not be done in advance.....So why did the other agent not tell me this. Just another example of MTN poor service . Now I guess I will receive a standard copy and paste response and I will be yet again be let down by customer service. I have had enough