Vodacom Contract Cancelation, a Hot Mess!

On 31 January 2023, I canceled my contract with Vodacom, i.e. I requested a premature cancellation quotation, received it, and duly paid on the same day. After paying, I contacted the cancellations department to confirm receipt of my payment and POP. This was confirmed and I was told that my account would be canceled and closed. While on this call, I also confirmed with the consultant that there were no outstanding payments or fees and she confirmed that as well. I waited two days for the cancellation to be processed and my number was moved to prepaid, I again called to confirm that everything was in order and that I had no outstanding fees, this was again confirmed. This all took place between and including 31 January 2023 and 2 February 2023.

We are now in May 2023... About a month ago, I was contacted by Vodacom, to confirm my reference number/account number. I inquired as to why and was told that I'd been handed over to pre-legal, I informed the consultant that I had canceled and that my account should not be in arrears, it should in fact be closed. The consultant had checked to verify whether my account was indeed canceled and she confirmed. She then informed me that the matter had been escalated as the account was supposed to be closed and that it would be resolved. To date, I have not received another call, nor email correspondence from Vodacom regarding this. I also have not received any invoices for fees outstanding since January 2023, yet I am being flagged for being in arrears for an account that should be closed.

I've made numerous calls to customer care, where I sat waiting in line for a consultant to answer, or when someone eventually did answer, I was told that they were unable to assist me and would subsequently forward my call to another department, who would then say the same thing or the line just mysteriously drops. Interestingly enough, on my first call to the alleged "Pre-legal" department today, I was told they couldn't access the invoice data and that I would have to call customer care to obtain the necessary invoice information, utterly useless in my opinion, as I was told that that was the department who could resolve the matter. On my second call to said pre-legal department, I was given a nonsensical explanation about an invoice that was generated a number of days after I had paid for cancelation and for which I was liable. When I initially contacted Vodacom in February 2023 to confirm all of this, I was told that I don't have any outstanding balances. Why is it so hard to sort this out? And why is it that no one at Vodacom is able to understand and fix this mess?