Very disappointing after sales services from Vodacom

I have a dispute regarding the first payment made on my Vodacom home LTE contract. I signed up for the contract and when Vodacom contacted me to confirm my details and to let me know that delivery will be made, I specifically asked them if the account gets activated ONLY when I insert the new sim into the new router. The lady I spoke to first spoke to another before coming back to me and confirmed that I WILL ONLY be billed from when I put the sim into the router and it is activated.

I inserted the sim on Wednesday 20th December and the light of the router was red. I was told that it could take 24 – 72 hours to be activated. Due to this my son had to buy me data (of 4gigs) in order for me to be in touch until then. On the 22 December 2023 there was still no change to the red light so I called the customer services who said that I had already been billed over a week ago – I told him that that was totally unfair as the sim has not even activated yet and the first month is suppose to be apportioned. He could not assist with that but he reset the router and said it should be working in 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, I tried again and it was still not working. I had to contact customer services again and was put through to the same consultant who said to me that I will need to take the sim and router in to the nearest Vodacom store so they can test it. I told him it is very difficult for me to do that - that is why I ordered it online in the first place – but again he said there was nothing he could do about it.

After that call my daughter had to buy me 2gigs as I had depleted my data (I thought by then I would have been already connected). So so far I had to spend for an additional 6gigs unnecessarily.

I then went back onto the Vodacom website in order to find a complaints section which I could not but fortunately my daughter spotted a section which mention unlocking the sim – nothing anywhere on the setup guide said anything about unlocking the sim and no-one mentioned this to me before - why did the consultant not ask me when I said to him that the light on the router was red if I had first unlocked the sim before inserting it into the router?!

Needless to say, there was nothing wrong with the sim or the router but what an utter waste of money and time. I still needed to write to complaints / disputes department. I checked online and was given customer care email address, which I wrote to and received an automated response to chat with TOBI. Then I went onto TOBI and the consultant I spoke to put me through to the accounts department and the call was dropped. Then I went online again and asked the sales consultants for an email address and all she wrote before ending the chat very abruptly was contact the customer care email address. So that just went in circles, which ends me up having to place my complaint here now.

So I wasted money on 6gigs which I did not need. And according to the lady I initially spoke to that specially went to confirm the information, I should only have been debited the portion from the 22 December to 31 December for the initial month!