HAS VODACOM IMPLEMENTED IT’S OWN FORM OF LOADSHEDDING?

Vodacom's service is beyond disappointing. Over the past 6 days, at the time of writing this message, we’ve had more than 35 hours of no data signal and, since the signal has still not been restored, this number is guaranteed to climb by the hour.

Data outages over the past 6 days… Wednesday 5 July 2023: 4:30pm - 11pm Thursday 6 July 2023: 5pm - 7pm Friday 7 July 2023: 5pm - 7pm Saturday 8 July: 9am - 11:30am & 5pm - 7pm Sunday 9 July 2023: 11pm to 11:30pm Monday 10 July: 3pm - 5:13pm & 9:30pm - 9:45pm & 11pm – 12am Tuesday 11 July: 12am – 17:18pm This uncannily resembles Eskom’s loadshedding schedule. There is, however, no connection. None of these outages took place during or at any time close to loadshedding periods. In any case, there’s been very little loadshedding over the past week.

Many of these outages appear to be planned. How is it that so many of them commence at exactly the top of the hour and cease at exactly the top or bottom of the hour 2 to 2.5 (or more) hours later?

I literally spend hours every month wasting air time on their call centre. Without data, this is the only means of reporting outages, which Vodacom should be tracking anyway. To add insult to injury and without fail, I am forced to deal with the robot called Toby who, at a leisurely pace finds it necessary to repeat the recorded message about the effects of loadshedding. All callers hear this message at the beginning of the call, and once is enough. Toby is never of any help whatsoever and amounts to nothing other than a ridiculous waste of both the caller’s time and air time. The customer however has no choice but to tolerate all of this just to speak to a human consultant.

Once getting through to a consultant, I then have to endure the barrage of verification questions before being able to report the outage. Further to that, it’s often difficult to hear the consultant with incessant shrieking and cajoling in the call centre’s background. At times it sounds more like a street party than a call centre. It would behoove Vodacom to invest in soundproofing their consultants’ workspaces and training them in the fundamentals of how to behave in a professional environment.

At the beginning of 2023, Vodacom took the liberty of increasing its prices across the board. My hope was that they would invest this money in improving their service. Quite the opposite is true. The user experience on all fronts is appalling for the customer, and I strongly suggest that Vodacom makes the effort to experience firsthand what the average customer needs to tolerate when their only option is to report an outage via the call centre, especially when the same call needs to be made repeatedly, week after week, month after month.

Vodacom is uncompromising when it comes to their monthly debits for services, despite failing to deliver. They even have the audacity to insist upon charging a cancellation fee when the customer wishes to terminate the contract because Vodacom has failed to deliver the service for which the customer is paying. It’s time for Vodacom to begin compensating their customers for these kinds of unacceptable outages and to begin to act on actually providing the services that they so boldly proffer when selling a customer a contract.

Finally, I posted this complaint on their Facebook wall. Their response? Well, nothing other than simply removing the post and doing nothing further. Public relations is apparently not their forte either.