Pathetic Upgrade Experience - Pathetic after sales service

At the end of April 2018 I was contacted by Vodacom's external upgrade department. I had 3 phone numbers on my name. 1 Line is for a tablet, 1 line is my own number and the 3rd line is used by my son. During the call, the representative who called my (Jericho Padayachee) said that all upgrade fees would be waived. I upgraded the tablet with more GBs and upgraded my own number with a bigger contract and new handset. After discussing my son's contract, I asked Jericho whether he could call my son and give the options for an upgrade to him, as I did not want to decide on the package for which my son will be paying.

My son informed me that he would be taking a contract which has 2 phones on it. The one would be his old number with an upgrade on the handset and the contract. There would be a 2nd number linked to this with 500 MB of data which would be included in this new package. The total charge for all of these contracts would be in the region of R1700 p.m.

The contracts would all start immediately (basically the beginning of May). At the beginning of May, my new contract was in place, but my son's contract was still the old one (this was after he had already received the 2 new handsets). I called Vodacom to enquire and they said that his new contract would only kick in from the beginning of June. A week or so later I received my 1st set of invoices with the new contract on it and it was chaos! There were upgrade fees charged on all of the contracts and the total statement amount was R2680. I called the call centre to again query this. I in fact called the call centre a few times, because no-one got back to me. During every call I was told that my son's additional contract had the 500MB deal on it. I was e-mailed and called by M****ha Alwar from the accounts department to say that she would correct the charges and fees which were charged. This was then fixed with the debit order which went off on the 1st of June - only to see that the fees were again added on the statement which I received in June!

In the meanwhile, I tried to get hold of Jericho who did the deal in the 1st place, because on one of my calls to the call centre, I was told that my son's contract would now only start on the 1st of July. There is no way of getting hold of these people in the 'external' department, unless you can leave a message at someone for them to call you back and then hope that they will. I struggled top get hold of their number in the 1st place and when I eventually did, I could not talk to him directly - I had to leave messages.

Eventually on the 1st of June, my son's original contract was updated to the new one, but the additional number now had R55 worth of airtime on it, instead of the promised 500MB data. When I called again to get hold of Jericho Padayachee, I was called back by his manager, mr Edhasen Moodley. He then told me that they don't have contracts on this package with 500MB data on it. I could not believe what I heard, as with every call which I made to Vodacom's customer care service, they wanted to know which contracts I had in place and in fact confirmed the 500MB deal on this additional phone. I told mr Moodley to go and listen to the recordings of all the conversations between myself, mr Padayachee, my son and the call centre. on more than one occasion did the call centre confirm this with me without me telling them what the contract was. Mr Moodley assured me that he would listen to the calls and get back to me. Between 11 June and today, there have been many e-mails - mostly from me to mr Moodley requesting feedback. He eventually called me back, saying that they have listened to all the recordings and we were wrong about the 500MB, but that they will correct the contract. I received an e-mail from him on 26 June stating that the contract would be fixed from 3 July.

Why was I not surprised on the 4th of July to get my account information and still not have 500MB data on this additional phone. And up to date and 3 e-mails later from me to mr Moodley, he has still not come back to me on this.

I will NEVER again do an upgrade of any sort of business with Vodacom's external office or any other person who calls me on behalf of Vodacom. I have spent hours trying to get hold of these people and they can, very conveniently not be reached.

I was told by many of the call centre operators that these people don't work for Vodacom - who do they work for then?? And if Vodacom whats to use them to do sales, they must surely also be able to handle queries created by these people.

My query is still not resolved. After 3 months of incorrect statements and invoicing, that problem seems to have been sorted - thank you M****ha. To the rest of the people with whom I had to deal to address this STILL UNRESOLVED issue - your service is pathetic. I have wasted my time to follow up on people who can not be reached and this is a very convenient way of avoiding unhappy customers and queries which you are not able to resolve.