The story of the telecommunications company wrongly setting debt collectors on customers they have let down is one as old as time – or at least as old as this page, and the story a reader shared with us last week was both new and yet wearyingly familiar.
Kathleen Peters signed up for a broadband and television package with Vodafone in October 2020, no doubt full of optimism over the new service she was going to be getting. The optimism did not last and a month after she signed on the dotted line, she still had no service. So she cancelled the account.
She did not do it quietly and only quit Vodafone after a good deal of correspondence and attempts to get the service she had agreed to pay for.
When the issue with her service was first identified, she had to contact Vodafone to organise an engineer to look into it and was told she “couldn’t get the speed I had signed up for and that it would have to be looked into”.
She sent us correspondence she had with Vodafone in early 2021 in which she told the company it had “been a nightmare in dealing with your customer service teams, so much so that in November I decided to go to another company and rang and visited store to say so and tried getting through to 1907 [the Vodafone customer support phone number].
She received a letter from the debt collectors Intrum (no strangers to this page), who were looking for over €700 in connection with her Vodafone account. ‘I was absolutely shocked and very upset’
“I kept getting texts about my account and was assured in store not to worry about it, that my account was being terminated. On December 6th I received text to say engineer was coming and again rang and notified [Vodafone] that I had gone with another company and cancelled the service.
“The engineer still arrived and was turned away. He apologised and said he had not been told it was cancelled. Then I received a bill from [Vodafone] on January 8th for a service I don’t have and spent a total of 52 minutes being passed on to six different people to be assured it was an error and no money would be taken from my account. On January 15th you took €70.51 from my account after I explicitly expressed the fact I owed you nothing and you did not have permission to touch my account. I called into your store on the same day and was assured it was an error and would be sorted and I still have heard nothing. This morning I went to my bank and got a direct debit indemnity claim to get the money refunded. To say your customer service is a disgrace is an understatement.”
That was in January 2021.
In May of the same year she received a letter from the debt collectors Intrum (no strangers to this page), who were looking for over €700 in connection with her Vodafone account. “I was absolutely shocked and very upset. I rang Intrum and they said they would look into it and if I heard nothing back then everything would be okay.”
She says she had a “terrible time trying to sort it out with Vodafone but was reassured on a phone call that it was an error. They refused to give me anything in writing or an email to say I owed them nothing. Thought that was the end of it.”
But it wasn’t and we have to fast forward to December 2022, more than two years after our reader initially thought she was done with Vodafone.
“I received a solicitor’s letter representing Intrum for Vodafone still looking for the money and threatening me with court. I was so upset and frustrated with the thoughts of going through the whole process again. I called into a store after several unsuccessful attempts to get through to the Vodafone 1907 number. I was handed their phone by area manager as they said they couldn’t deal with issue and had to ring 1907. After getting through I was passed around to several people before being left on hold. In total I was on phone approximately 45 mins and hung up as I had to go to work.
“Eventually I received a text saying that my account was closed but I want something in writing, something official to protect myself in case I receive any more letters. They have refused.”
She also contacted ComReg but was told they “could do nothing about my complaint on how I’ve been treated as they only deal with issues going back a year and because my first dealings with Vodafone were in October 2020 there was nothing they could do. Is there anything else I could do to get that letter from Vodafone or do I have to leave it go and just hope I hear no more from them?”
Well we figured we might as well give it a shot. We got in touch with Vodafone and received the following statement.
“At Vodafone, we strive to provide an unrivalled customer experience across all areas of our business. On this occasion, we recognise that we fell short of our standard of service in our cancellation and billing process, which caused undue distress for this customer. We are reviewing the process internally to identify and close any gaps. We have contacted all parties to rectify this immediately and can confirm that the debt collection agency have permanently removed these files and they will not be in touch about this matter again. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Postal problems
Tom O’Mahony was in the market for some turntable needles and found what he was looking for on a website called fruugo.ie. All was well and he placed the order assuming they would be coming from Ireland given the .ie website address. It wasn’t to be. “Only after I’d placed the order and got a dispatch email did I discover they were coming from China,” he says.
“Helpfully, the email gave me an An Post tracking number so I was soon able to see that the item had arrived at the Dublin Parcel Hub on December 28th.”
Happy days.
No.
His turntable needles were never delivered. “When I managed to get through to An Post customer service, they told me that they could see in the system that the item had gone to the local sorting office in Dunshaughlin for delivery, but they could not investigate it any further unless the seller raised a query through their postal service. So I’m dependent on the Chinese seller escalating this issue through the Chinese postal service if I’m to have any hope of getting my delivery,” he says.
“It seems daft to me that the system works this way. Why can’t An Post follow up directly as I have the tracking number?”
By coincidence, we received a second query about a missing delivery, although this one had not come all the way from China. On December 12th, Ita McTigue sent a letter by express post from An Post on Collins Avenue to an address in Malahide. “To date it has not been delivered and is still showing on the track and trace as having been received in Collins Avenue at 14.47 on December 12th.”
In the middle of December, Ita writes, she completed “the necessary form online and sent it to An Post and was allocated a case number. At that point, the trial went cold and she heard nothing back from An Post.
“I have emailed and called customer service and corresponded via web chat but it is not possible to get through to the people dealing with the problem. Initially I was told it would take 30 working days to have the matter dealt with but last week I was told it would take up to 60 working days,” she writes.
“There were vouchers in the envelope. I sent it Express because the recipient does not have to sign and I thought that would be more convenient during the Christmas rush with people being out more. I thought it would be safe being that it was tracked. Obviously I was wrong. Now I realise that registered post is the method to use. The local post office said that they take better care of registered post because it is insured.”
There is no insurance on Express Post items. Valuables should always be sent by Registered Post on which there is insurance available in the case of loss or damage in transit
— An Post spokeswoman
She says she does not know “if the letter is lost or if it has been stolen. If it takes 60 working days to get a reply to a complaint such as mine, either An Post is not taking complaints seriously or they have an awful lot of them. Is there anything I can do to progress my issue?”
We got in touch with An Post, which in response sent us updates on both customers issues.
In connection with the record needles, a spokeswoman said the company “handled hundreds of thousands of parcels during December and we are very sorry about these customers’ experiences. In Tom’s case it appears that the package was returned to the sender in China as some of final address details were unclear. We have been in touch with Tom to get some more details so that we can reimburse him and assist him in getting a replacement from the sender.”
With regard to Ita, the spokeswoman apologised for the delay in responding to her. “Again we have been in touch with her to get some more details about the content so that we can complete a thorough trawl of all undeliverable mail from the period – in case the item was damaged in transit and rendered undeliverable. We have also alerted our Investigation Team. There is no insurance on Express Post items. Valuables should always be sent by Registered Post on which there is insurance available in the case of loss or damage in transit.”
Credit card interest
A reader by the name of Margaret got in touch about credit card balance transfers. She had an Ulster Bank credit card and with that bank almost out the door now went in search of a new provider. “I got a new credit card account [and] as I had a balance of €945 with Ulster Bank and [the new card provider was] offering a 0 per cent balance transfer option for 12 months I took advantage of this and cleared the old credit card. So far so good.”
Margaret used the new card as normal “and cleared the full amount on these purchases and €100 off the balance transfer amount. On the next statement I was charged interest of €64.66″
Expecting zero interest she contacted the company and was told that if she had “simply had the balance transfer €945 on my account, and didn’t use the card for any purchases (for up to 12 months), I would not pay any interest for the 12 months. However, if I used the card then unless I cleared the balance in full, including the €945 balance transfer, then interest would be charged at the standard rate on all retail spend until the full balance is cleared.”
She was subsequently charged additional interest of €18 on the next statement. She did get refunded the full interest charged “as they agreed that it hadn’t been explained to me but I think people should be made aware of this, I’m an accountant and I wasn’t aware of this.”
Smithwicks for 20% extra
“I am a regular customer at Kennedy’s Pub in Mount Merrion that is owned by the Press Up Group,” began the mail from Tom Hoban. “For quite some time the price of a pint of Smithwicks has been €5 and was so on Thursday January 19th. However, when I returned on Saturday evening, January 21st, the price had increased to €6.″ That’s a whopping 20 per cent extra.
“When I asked why this had happened I was told, ‘Because Head Office said so.’ I pointed out that Diageo had recently announced a price increase of about 12p that was expected to push up retail prices by maybe 20p-25p but nothing like this increase was mentioned. Their pint of Guinness remains at €5.80 and a lager may have gone up 16 cent or so, while all other drink prices remain static, so this was not an across-the-board increase.”
He says that over the course of his more than 70 years on the planet, including many budgets and price increases, “I have never encountered such blatant greed and total disrespect for the customer as per this case… all the worse too in view of the present harsh economic climate we negotiate.”
We contacted Press Up and they were straight up in their response. A spokeswoman said it was correct that there were “recently price increases of drinks in Kennedys pub and Smithwicks is €6″.
It may have cost slightly more than a fiver before the increase, she noted.
She said of the increase: “The reason for this is that costs have gone up across the board – wages, supplier costs, light and heat, insurance, utilities, crockery and utensils, maintenance – almost every single line in our costs have gone up. This isn’t a case of ‘greed and disrespect for the customer’ – we won’t see any difference in this as our margin remains the same. We are hugely conscious about the pinch that our customers are feeling and are trying to maintain prices in so far as possible while still operating a business. It’s important to note that any increase made to our prices are done with this in mind, while also looking at several other competitors in the areas of each of our premises.”
She said the company “would love to keep prices the same but it’s simply not possible at this time and Press Up/Kennedys are in no way unique in this situation, it’s happening industry wide as I’m sure you’re seeing and hearing from readers.”
She also accepted that the business would “definitely learn from [our reader’s] email though, in seeing the importance of better educating our teams on the ground as to the why of any prices increases so customers aren’t met with answers that ‘it was head office’! This will start from today, it’s important that our team members understand the business case and requirement for any price increases.”
