I feel like just another paycheck (number) to Vodacom

First, I would like to state that I have been a client of Vodacom for 16 years. In these 16 years I have dutifully paid my account every month and feel that I have more than held up my commitment of paying for a service. Also, since Vodacom is slightly more expensive in certain regards, I expected that Vodacom is a better company with sustainable infrastructure and that I would be treated as a valued client.

On 27/06/2018, I reported that I had no network service where I live for almost the whole day. As I sit and write this review out of pure frustration, my service is showing "No Service" and Vodacom's errors with their tower have still not been fixed.

Over the next almost two months, I regularly followed up on the status of my service requests and experienced the following: - Call centre agents place my call on hold without asking if they may. - Call centre agents place me on hold for 10-20 minutes without checking in once and asking me to remain on the line. - My service requests were marked as "completed" on their system without fixing the errors or reporting back to me. Several complaints regarding this have still gone unanswered. - Several call centre agents and their team leaders neglected to report back on any of my requests and to date I still have no valid explanation - After two weeks, I notified Vodacom to not debit my account with the monthly subscription as I do not feel I received the level of service I am paying for. The only feedback I ever received in this regard was an automated call asking me to pay my account. The amount was later debited without my consent and amounts to theft. Vodacom is therefore *****ing a portion of my money for a service I did not receive. - A technical staff member admitted that some cells on the tower were damaged, but since repaired. When I enquired regarding the continued lack of consistent service, I was told that the tower had some issues, but could take two years to be replaced and fixed properly. As I recently upgraded, I am basically locked into a two year contract with the worst service imaginable. - No technician has visited my location to do a signal check - My data connection constantly stops working and I have to restart my phone or change the network and swop back around to Vodacom to enable it again. - I have continuously asked Vodacom to rectify the situation, but was provided, without any option, with 2Gb of extra data. I do not even use 20% of my existing plan's data and together with my previous point, do not see any use or advantage in that.

I am at wit's end in my dealings with Vodacom. While everything works, Vodacom is a pleasure, but when it goes wrong, there is no channel to find recourse and no-one to contact who will provide feedback and get the errors fixed.

Under the CPA, we have certain rights which are being disregarded by Vodacom at this stage. Therefore I call on anyone who has had a similarly disappointing level of service delivery from Vodacom to lodge formal complaints at https://www.saconsumercomplaints.co.za/your-rights/

In the end, all I wanted was what I was used to receiving from Vodacom and if the "faulty tower" incident did not occur, I too would have been blissfully unaware of Vodacom's total disregard towards me as a consumer. Rather, I feel like I am just another debit order to them.