Complete incompetence in Call Centre / Customer Care

On Sunday 04 March 2018 my cell phone was ******. I reported this and blocked the line / blacklisted the device. By 11h00 Sunday morning I went to the Vodacom shop in Northgate to do a SIM swap. Once done the lady who attended to me advised it would take 2 - 4 hours to activate.

By Monday 05 March 2018 the line was still not active. I called Vodacom customer care call centre and was advised the line was locked because it is in arrears.

I wish to point out the following: On 03 March 2018 I paid R857.77 to the account, as per the last invoice received. The consultant confirmed it was the January invoice and not Feb. She then sent me a copy of the Feb and March invoices. As per the Feb invoice, which I had not received prior to this point, I had short paid by an amount of R32.66, which I promptly paid and sent the proof of payment to the customer care email address.

At NO POINT did any Vodacom staff contact me to enquire about payment or advise that the payment on the 3rd of March was short. It is NOT my job to remind you to bill me, as the staff have intimated "you should have called". No, I shouldn't. YOUR job is to bill me and send the bill to me timeously and my job is to pay the bill received. If not paid YOUR JOB is to contact me (you do after all have my landline and email address too) to advise me of same. And WHY would you lock a line that is not even 7 days overdue?

Numerous calls later, and after being assured each time the line was being unlocked immediately, the line is STILL not active.

In the interim, the response from customer care email was to send me the accounts again. WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT? READ THE EMAIL THAT WAS SENT TO YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE!

This morning I spoke to yet another consultant in the customer care call centre and the consultant (Valencia) advised that the user Mngqithi had cancelled the instruction to reactivate the line. WHY WAS THAT DONE?

I am utterly sick and tired of the sheer incompetence of Vodacom staff and cannot wait for the contract to be finished so that I can move to a different network. The incompetence across the board has already resulted in us moving all our company accounts to Telkom.

The only time you seem to get any sort of response from Vodacom is if you go and act like a mad person on Facebook.

I have AGAIN sent the relevant proof of payment, although I have zero faith that anything will be done, as their system will just send a stupid authentication mail and once authenticated some *********** idiot will again only send copies of my invoices, instead of reading the mail initially sent. How they manage to stay in business with their ******** reputation and horrific service levels is beyond me.