Chapter 9: 27th & 28th October 2009

Four Steps to Deadlock

From: Paul Ebrey
Sent: 27 October 2009 17:21
To: 'Web Relations UK'
Subject: RE: Further to our conversation

Hi Kirsty,

First of all, thank you for getting in touch with me yesterday. Its good to know that someone at Vodafone cares enough to respond – even though its unfortunate that in order to receive said response I had to set up an entire web site.

I am also glad that you are dis-appointed in Vodafone’s response so far. I have been too – as have all the followers on the afore mentioned web site!

You kindly offer a solution to my problems. Alas, as we discussed, my problems have already been solved – and not via anyone at Vodafone – the nice people at Virgin did that. So we are really talking about compensation here, not a solution.

That said, I would like to be able to come to an agreement with you in order that we can bring the matter to an amicable close.

So far, the offers from Vodafone all involve me returning as a reluctant customer, and accepting a level of compensation far below what I believe is reasonable given the circumstances. Your offer of 12 months free line rental goes some way further, but not far enough and still involves me returning as a customer.

However, I am always willing to come to a compromise.

It seems clear that Vodafone do not want to agree any kind of financial deal to end this matter (At least, not without us involving legal departments and lawyers). It has also been my stand so far that I will not return as a customer. Therefore in the interests of bringing the matter to a close, might I suggest the following compromise:

  • I sell myself to the devil and return to Vodafone – under your personal supervision!

  • You provide the 12 months line rental free of charge and contract free, as per your offer.

  • You agree that I deal with your department as a single point of contact (Not normal customer services) should I have any issues during those 12 months – as per your offer

  • You provide me with two shiny new phones (I hear that Samsung Jet is nice). This will allow me to experience Vodafone’s first rate service levels on the latest kit, whilst also persuading my wife to stay and continue paying her Vodafone contract (As I mentioned, she has already received her pac code and is about to move to join me as a Virgin).

As you can see – the compromise here is that you are increasing your offer, and I am agreeing to return to the lions den along with my wife. This will allow you to prove “that Vodafone can be good and can get things right”, as you suggested in our phone call.

Please let me know as soon as possible if you find this agreeable.

As ever, I will keep the web site and all our loyal followers up to date with progress.

Best Regards,

Paul Ebrey

From: Web Relations UK [mailto:webrelations@gb.vodafone.co.uk]
Sent: 27 October 2009 19:31
To: Paul Ebrey
Subject: RE: Further to our conversation

Hi Paul

Thanks for coming back to me and considering my offer.

I’m really pleased to see that you are contemplating returning to us.

My team and I would have no problem helping you with any account queries you may have in the future as a customer.

The plan you had originally chosen was a Sim Only deal where you get 600 anytime minutes and Unlimited Texts. This is works out to a maximum of £210 worth of calls and £360 worth of texts over a month. We’re happy to offer this price plan free of charge for 12 months with no minimum contract term. This has an equivalent value of £6840 over the 12 month period.

As this is a Sim only plan as standard it doesn’t come with a handset. We are also offering the line rental at no cost to you and with no contract. As a further gesture on our part I am willing to offer a handset that would allow you to use these services if you do not already have one. The phone would be a Nokia 2323.

If you would like us to look into upgrade options for your wife feel free to pass our email address onto her so that she can email us to discuss her account.

I would love to resolve this for you, please let me know if you would like to go ahead with this offer and I’ll be in touch

All the best

Kirsty
Web Relations Team
Digital Service Operations
Vodafone UK

From: Paul Ebrey
Sent: 28 October 2009 10:18
To: 'Web Relations UK'
Subject: RE: Further to our conversation

Kirsty,

“Thanks for coming back to me and considering my offer”.

..unfortunately you seem to have given my offer little or no thought. Instead of taking the opportunity I presented to resolve the situation, you have chosen to waver back to a stance that Vodafone have taken from the beginning – one of arrogance and deliberate mis-guidance.

“I’m really pleased to see that you are contemplating returning to us.”

I think we can safely re-phrase to “I am glad you were contemplating a deal, but luckily we showed our true colours - again.” Close though – I have to give you that.

What, might you say, am I talking about. Surely your offer was very fair? Well, let’s take a closer look at your numbers:

“The plan you had originally chosen was a sim Only deal where you get 600 anytime minutes and Unlimited Texts. This is works out to a maximum of £210 worth of calls and £360 worth of texts over a month. We’re happy to offer this price plan free of charge for 12 months with no minimum contract term. This has an equivalent value of £6840 over the 12 month period.”

So, by your figures, I subscribed to a plan costing £570 per month. That’s where you get your £6840 per year.

Now, I am in the lucky position of not being on the breadline. However, I really don’t think I would have subscribed to that. So, just to make sure, I had a look. I was right. Your website states that a sim only deal with 600 anytime minutes and unlimited texts is £20 per month. Look:

http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-price-plans/all-plans?initialFilters=flt_paymonthly&WT.svl=value2

I am not wrong (I rarely am to be honest).

So, by my maths, the value of your offer is £20 x 12 months = £240. Less of course the value of my custom, my wifes’ custom, and less the value of my time (a grand total of no reductions then – according to Vodafone!)

So we seem to be a mere £6600 different in our valuations.

At this point I also took time to research how you arrived at your value of £360 of texts. Your standard text rate is 12p, so this is 3000 texts a month. But that’s strange – you are offering me unlimited texts? Some digging around on your website reveals that your advert of unlimited texts are subject to a fair use policy “ each month of 3000 text messages. Usage above this will be automatically charged at your price plan rate.” Now maybe I am old fashioned, but surely, when you have it written in black & white that anything above 3000 WILL be charged, you cannot ethically advertise the service as unlimited.

The detail of your offer is starting to look more and more false.

Oh – but wait. You kindly included the offer of a Nokia 2323 as “a handset that would allow you to use these services”. Now, apart from the fact that I currently use a Nokia N95 and suggested to you that a Samsung Jet might make a suitable candidate as part of a compromise (I remind you, we are talking about compensation for Vodafones’ wrong doing and law breaking here), I don’t think your choice of phone is at all suitable.

I don’t just mean that it’s not a very good phone. It’s that by inference you mean that this phone will allow me to experience Vodafone at its best. Which begs the question, why did they invent the N95? The Iphone? The Samsung Jet? The simple answer is that they are better phones, and enable me to better use the services I currently enjoy (from Virgin. On my N95.). Seems like I am stating the obvious, no doubt. The trouble is, that I am.

The bigger problem is, again by inference, by suggesting I take a sub-standard phone, you are suggesting I experience Vodafones’ service at a something other than its best. And sub-standard service is something that is rapidly becoming synonymous with Vodafone.

So, I again remind you that we are talking about compensation – not a nice cosy offer to shut me up and get a nice resolution posted on the web site.

But, for completeness, lets factor in the cost of that phone into our agreement.

Well, at least that’s what I thought I would do. Except here I came across a problem. You don’t actually sell that phone on any of your contracts – at least according to your website. Or for that matter, on PAYG. Presumably I am correct – it’s not good enough. This offer really isn’t – is it?

So instead I google’d for the Nokia N2323. I can buy it for £49.99 from Play.com. Adding that to your compensation gives me a total value of £6890. My valuation remains at £240, as I would never use the phone. That leaves us with a difference of £6650 in our valuations.

Really, at this point, I should give up and start talking to the lawyers – after all, Vodafone have had more than enough chances to do the right thing. But I am more determined than that. So I think we should still try to come to an agreement on compensation for one last time. However, we have vast differences in our valuations now. So let’s do the obvious thing - something that everyone else would agree is sensible. Lets meet in the middle.

So, half of the difference is £3325. Plus my original valuation (£240) is £3565.

You have my address already, so I should look forward to receiving a cheque. However, there is one more thing to add:

Today I received a bill for £12.67 relating to the period when I was not a customer (despite being promised it wouldn’t happen – but we know about Vodafone promises already). I think for ease of administration we should add this to your cheque. So £3572.67.

I am really pleased we have been able to talk about this matter sensibly. And I really hope that you agree with the figures I have calculated. Because if you don’t, you really should have read your email before you sent it.

Best Regards,

Paul Ebrey

From: Web Relations UK [mailto:webrelations@gb.vodafone.co.uk]
Sent: 28 October 2009 18:45
To: Paul Ebrey
Subject: RE: Further to our conversation

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your time on the phone today. Apologies for the delay in sending this email.

As we discussed, I'm unable to offer anything further than what was previously offered by the Customer Relations Team or Kirsty.

As you're not happy with our offer of 600 Minutes and Unlimited Texts free for the next twelve months as well as a free handset, I'd like to explain how you can further your complaint.

You'd already made contact with the Customer Relations Team before we at Web Relations got in touch with you, so as you've said you'd like to persue the ombudsman route, I've forwarded this email back over to them for us to move onto the next steps. Should you choose to take the legal route mentioned, then please address any formal letters to:

Vodafone Group Plc
Vodafone House
The Connection
Newbury
Berkshire
RG14 2FN
England

As you requested, in this email I'm also repeating my comments regarding your web page. What I stated on the phone call was that I'd only scan-read the pages. The reason for this is that I was looking for a way of finding your details before passing your query onto Kirsty from my team so that she could investigate fully and help. I'd read all of the first page, some of the second and then glanced through the rest (although obviously I'm already aware of the email response Kirsty sent to you.) Kirsty then summarised the issues for me, as did Andrew who you'd dealt with previously in the Customer Relations Team.

Upon coming into the office today I noticed you'd replied to Kirsty's email, and as she wasn't in today and the other two members of the Web Relations Team hadn't had any involvement with your case, I decided to pick it up to get this fixed as soon as possible for you due to the amount of time it'd been going on, as I had some prior knowledge. As I knew there wasn't anything more we could offer to meet your requests, I was simply calling to reiterate this and discuss the next steps, so I hadn't taken the time to read through your experiences in detail as they'd already been taken into account by Kirsty, Andrew and Andrew's manager, Karen. I completely see your point of view that your feelings over this experience do really matter, and they do matter to me too, but it would have been uneconomical for me to spend time reading through your experiences again, only to agree with what we'd already offered and refuse to offer anything more. I have massive confidence in Kirsty from my team and her ability to make the right decisions, and am proud to work in a company where the other departments around where I work share the same passion for doing the right thing for our customers. For these reasons I completely trust what had been offered before was the best possible option, and so was just looking to move onto the next stage for you as soon as possible. I'm sorry if you don't think that's what I meant; I did try to explain this over the phone.

Should you change your mind about our offer, please let me know and we'll be in touch to sort things out.

Best Wishes,

Tom Rushton
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK

From: Paul Ebrey
Sent: 28 October 2009 19:54
To: 'Web Relations UK'
Subject: RE: Further to our conversation

Tom,

Many thanks for your belated response. I was starting to thing you acting in continuance of Vodafone’s recent tradition of promising communications and then not bothering.

I now await your deadlock letter so that we can further involve the people at Otelo.

However, for completeness, I would like to respond to some of the points you made:

  1. You mention that I already made contact with the customer relations team prior to you getting in contact. This is true – and my final letter was addressed to the customer services manager – on the advice of Otelo. Unsurprisingly I have not received a response.

  2. You did indeed state that you had only had a glimpse through the correspondence. You stated that the reasoning for this was that it was “Uneconomical” for you to do so, and that “There is nothing contained in the letters that would make me change my mind”. Interesting point of view for a manager – to adopt a point of view and insist that although you know very little about what has happened, you are sure that you are right. Its also the biggest insult yet – from anyone in any department at Vodafone – to suggest that you have messed up so badly that you just can’t be bothered to look at the detail.

  3. Your knowledge of the case and its detail was shown to be extremely sketchy – you missed minor points, such as the fact I had already responded to Andrew Woodvine with a mere 900 word letter. You also missed some more significant points. The bit where you stated “You are not entitled to compensation – it says so in our terms and conditions” proves you simply don’t know – I never agreed to your terms. You also stated that Vodafone would not have set up a direct debit without permission – but its well documented they did.

  4. You chose not to offer anything more – even though I had offered you a compromise deal.

Finally, I am glad you have confidence in your team. Certainly, even though her email was mis-guided, Kirsty went the furthest of anyone from Vodafone in an attempt to put matters right. Work which was completely undone today.

However, even the lovely Kirsty has to be questioned. She, according to you, fully investigated the case. Read all the letters. Looked at the accounts, the communications history. This she would need to do – in order to fully understand the case and respond accordingly. It was her information on which you based your decision.

Shame then, that the offer of 600 minutes and free texts was supposed to represent the plan I originally requested. It doesn’t – but then, you knew that didn’t you? Surely?

...which means from start to finish, Vodafone have not managed to get a single detail right.

Well done on the shared passion for doing your customers. It truly is a unique selling point for Vodafone’s services.

Paul Ebrey

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