VODACOM SA POOR SERVICE COMPLAINT

VODACOM SA POOR SERVICE COMPLAINT

On the 12th of January our offices lodged a query with Vodacom because we were experiencing poor signal at our one premises, located in the Wonderboom/Sinoville area in Pretoria against the mountain side, leading to calls with clients being dropped on a constant basis and important live applications not updating timeously; which in turn lead to delayed turnaround time on work.

After speaking with Sandra and Sifiso in the customer care department who did a sim and router reset from their side, the problem persisted so we had to call back.

Spoke with Xolani who wanted to do a router trouble shoot, but this was unnecessary as the router was working fine and the problem was a Network issue.

Our premises lies on the border between two cellphone towers and the signal for Vodacom just barely reaches the property. That is why the signal keeps dropping and we keep losing calls. As we are an internet dependent company we are losing a lot of business due to this issue.

We spoke again to Phumsile who confirmed that a request for a Network Booster had been submitted and she would give us feedback within 24-48 hours. She never came back to us.

On 15 January we received notification that our service ticket (A2-OHCJ-W521QA) had been closed, upon following up with Nandi at the customer care centre we were told that only the service section of the ticket was closed as a Network department action had been logged for the booster. They said our reference number remained the same.

We were told on the 15th that we would receive feedback by the 18th of January, this never happened. We phoned back again on the 19th and spoke to Kanyisile who could only see a request for the booster was placed, no feedback. She also promised to get back to us with feedback, which never happened. A network Escalation form was submitted together with a complaint to the customer care department as there is no way of contacting the Network Department directly.

On 20 January we phoned and asked to speak to a manager. We were transferred to Khuto, who is actually only a team leader. He promised feedback by end of day which never came. We had to call them again.

After this call, we received a call back from Shevon in the technical department at 16:50 who stated that a technician would call us to arrange for the installation. On 21/01 we called to speak to her again as we had not received a call, instead we could only speak with Neo, who confirmed, on behalf of Khuto that he got feedback that the Booster was actioned.

On 21 January we ended up calling the customer care devision roughly 8 times in an attempt to get written confirmation that we would receive the booster as requested. No one could give it to us. We were told that a manager, Nombulelo Thwala would call us back but that also never happened.

Our office manager spoke with Analise from technical department, after we had to call and threaten to leave Vodacom for good, who said that the booster was never approved and that they were still investigating. She would give feedback on the 22nd of January. Still no feedback from her received.

After several calls to the customer care department on the , speaking and emailing with Nombulelo Thwala of the customer care department we have still not received satisfactory feedback about an issue that has been bothering us for a number of years.

The biggest issue that we have been facing throughout this process is that we cannot communicate directly with the department who is supposed to be dealing with our problem.

The most feedback we were able to get from Nombulelo is an email stating that the Network department is still discussing how to handle our problem, after nearly two weeks of constant calling from our side, and requesting that they please give us more info so we can know what is going on with our contracts.

With this in mind we have decided to rather leave Vodacom and move our several contracts to a new service provider in the hopes that they might provide us with better service.