26 Mar 2012 - Update Highest Rated Pain Stories Highest Rated Gain Stories Vodafail Local Facebook Page
Dear visitor,

Since its inception Vodafail.com has made a significant contribution towards raising awareness of the problems and issues faced by Vodafone customers.

Vodafone Australia customers have had the opportunity to voice their concerns, their fears and their troubles from every corner of Australia and beyond our borders. You have gathered the courage to stand up for your rights as consumers and to make your voice heard.

Each and every person who shared their story should have a sense of pride in this achievement and the changes that have occurred since the start of Vodafail.com.

More recently, traffic to Vodafail.com has declined significantly. Having achieved the goal of raising awareness and promoting concrete action in early 2011, we have now reached the point of closing Vodafail to new complaints. The site will remain online for as long as possible as a reminder and an example of what is possible when we share our experiences.

It has been a privilege to run this initiative and I'm am forever grateful for the help and support I've received. In particular I would like to thank Melissa, David and Travis for their continued efforts over the past 15 months. I'm also thankful and humbled by the support of ACCAN, Choice magazine and a wide range of media outlets, blogs and websites.

You can still browse existing stories and find out how to file a complaint if you are experiencing problems.

Until next time,

Adam Brimo

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18071 Someone from NSW thinks vodafone is Very at 21 May 2011 10:38:17 PM
I ditched voda 2 months ago through the ombudsman. Now I've been given a marketing assignment to write a pitch save voda. Ugh. Anyone got any genius ideas??? They seemed to have pulled out all the marketing stops which makes it hard to come up with an idea.

The only thing i've come up with so far is to have a chat service on this site where you can voice your issues one on one to a live service rep. Thoughts??
21 May 2011 10:48:28 PM: I should add that me and my whole family were loyal voda customers for ten years and never had any problems. My 3 months of terrible reception and 12 agonizing hours on the phone to customer service means il probably never go back. But now, looking at it from a marketing perspective its pretty brutal how in the period of a few months a brand image can be completely destroyed.
22 May 2011 12:50:35 AM: which uni you at??

You should google skype because they had problems too, but managed them totally differently to Vodafone - they apologised and issued free credit to everyone (I think, I read about it ages ago) but whatever they did they did a good job and people knew they were genuine about it and honest about owning up to their mistakes, which made people feel less unhappy :) Voda, by contrast, ...well you know what happened there.. crocadile tears from Nigel Dews and no real action, placing every possible barrier between a sane customer and the exit!

Here's what I'd recommened:
First and foremost, prevention is the best cure, so they should have known in advanced that their infrastructure was inadequate - in marketing courses they never shut up about how important marketing research is - and this is a perfect example of why! They should have ensured quality, because losing loyal customers (which are cash-cows for the company) are like losing gold bullion - last thing you want to do!

Assuming they made a massive oversight and allowed this to happen, they should:

i) conduct a company inquiry into it immediately to learn how severe the problem is. Act soon to nip the problem in the bud, do not wait 3 or more months before taking this step.

ii) make a press release stating the problem, it's cause and what people can do to get around it (where possible)

iii) give something back to all customers to win back faith, it could be something small but just the acknowledgement to say "my bad"

iv) knowing that some customers, esp the self-employed and business customers, need their phones to be reliable, they should give customers an easy way out with no contract termination fees - that's the very least they should do - most of the furor was because of a relatively small (by "small" I mean 40,000 or so, which is small in relation to their total customer base) number of customers who relied on their phone's reliability, and were let down.

v) do not under any circumstances get your call centre to lie to customers

vi) make sure your call centre staff are capable in terms of their product knowledge and representation - do not allow your image to be degraded by poor resourcing of customer service staff (the Tasmanian ones are just ok but the Mumbai makes auschwitz seem welcoming). Make sure there's no incentive for call centre staff to transfer calls endlessly, infuriating customers.

vii) Vodafone should liaise with regulators (namely the TIO) to advocate for them to undertake a massive and ongoing marketing campaign of their own to ensure full awareness, so dismayed customers know where to go if Vodafone or any other telco aren't handling their enquiry properly. Why should Vodafone do this? because it would actually benefit them by incentivising them to improve their service - at present they have no reason to improve because the 1/100 customers that actually go to the TIO has so small an effect (usually less than $100) that it's not worth Vodafone worrying about it too much.

viii) give customers accurate timeframes as to when services will be functioning, and send that to them (don't make them have to go out of their way to find it).

That's my 2c. Actually, it's a lot better then anyone at Vodafone could come up :)
22 May 2011 04:21:35 PM: Thanks so much for your response. Has given me some good ideas!! I'm not at uni, work in the industry, but doing weekend school. Would lOve to run my idea by some people but I know other people from class will be checkin this site haha. Thanks again for ur insight!!