12 Weeks After Online Upgrade Order And Still Not Finalized

I am posting this complaint on behalf of my father, who is a senior citizen, pensioner, widower and loyal Vodacom subscriber of around 25 years.

On 26 November 2018, I assisted my father with placing an online upgrade order via the upgrade facility on Vodacom's website. It is a process I am fami**** with as I had done it on several previous occasions for my own upgrades. At the time, the process appeared to have completed successfully as we followed the online prompts, entered all his details correctly, received and correctly entered the Vodacom upgrade OTP's. On that same day, my father received a confirmation SMS of the upgrade order.

On 11 December 2018, my father received a SMS message from Vodacom that reads as follows: "Your order has been successfully processed. Our courier partner will send you your waybill tracking number via SMS - Vodacom :)". The same message was sent to him by Vodacom on 29 December 2018, 20 January 2019 and 31 January 2019.

He has, however, to date received no further communication from Vodacom or any courier with regard to my upgrade order which has still not been finalized.

After 7 weeks had passed since having placed the upgrade order and my father still not having received his new handset, we logged into his Vodacom online account in an attempt to track the status of his order and was shocked to discover that it does not appear in his order history.

We have queried the matter with Vodacom on several occasions, via online chat and telephone call, but we've had no success in getting a Vodacom representative to move the order along, nor can any Vodacom staff provide an explanation as to what is causing the delay. Each time we are told that whatever issue was causing the delay has now been resolved and that we will receive the new handset shortly, which never happens.

When attempting to track the order with a waybill number we were provided with during these inquiries, a result stating "NO TRACKING FOUND" is generated.

We have reached a point where we don't know what more we can do in order to get the upgrade order finalized and we are considering cancelling my father's Vodacom subscription and moving to a different service provider.

If any competent senior Vodacom staff members are monitoring these complaints, we implore you to kindly investigate this matter and report back to us regarding the status of my father's upgrade order as a matter of urgency.