Extremely bad upgrade service between Vodacom and Couriers

My parents stay on a farm where they don't have very good cellphone signal. They have a vodacom and a cell c contract because the signal of each network doesn't always work.

Their vodacom phone stopped working so on 25 June they upgraded to a Vivo Y11 uChoose Flexi 230 on special for R229. Because it was such a good deal, I also app**** for the same contract and subsequently got my phone about 3 days after the application and they where still waiting to even get a confirmation call from Vodacom.

I tried to call Vodacom and check the status but I was always told they will only talk to my father as he is the account holder even just for a status update. I do understand this but this is an extreme situation as he is hard of hearing and the signal is pretty bad most of the time and they have been waiting for more than a week already.

I then asked my mom to help my dad as I am far away from them and could not physically help them out. My mom who is not too tech savvy had to swop sims from the working phone for her to be able to phone Vodacom for free, and then swop the sims gain as most people phone her on the other number. This went on for a few days until eventually she got hold of somebody that could help and said the courier company did not understand the address so they sent the phone back to the warehouse without even phoning my parents.

She then said it would be better to cancel the application and reapply because it will be tedious for them to fill in the forms to request the phone back. Almost a month later I asked my parents to follow up again as it was taking extremely long without hearing anything back.

Now it seems when they cancelled the application the special finished so they put her on a uchoose Flexi 175 contract which is more expensive than the special for the 230 and now there seems to be a backlog for the phone so she lost the initial phone assigned to her and the special.