Vodacom says sorry with 500MB

SERVICE PROVIDER MAKES AMENDS BUT CUSTOMERS STILL NOT HAPPY

Service provider apologises to legions of irate customers who lost data due to a system glitch.

Free bundles over and above airtime and data refunds processed by company.

Vodacom yesterday made a 500MB apology to legions of irate customers who lost data from their Vodacom balances due to a system glitch at the network provider.

The company has not disclosed how many customers were affected by the problem, which emerged on Monday and generated a storm of protest on social media.

Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub said affected customers would receive “a 500MB bundle for free, over and above the airtime and data refunds processed by the company”.

He added: “The system error, which impacted certain prepaid and top-up customers, was caused by a configuration change on Vodacom’s prepaid and top-up billing system. The error clearly caused inconvenience and we’ve worked very hard since we picked it up to make it right and refund all our affected customers.

“But we wanted to go a step further to apologise and thank our customers for their loyalty, so we’ve taken the decision to give each affected customer a free 500MB bundle which they can use over three days,” said Joosub.

Although Joosub said such an error has never happened before, The Citizen tracked down complaints of depleting data that were posted on Vodacom’s Twitter account from 2015 and 2016. Vodacom responded to some of these queries on the social media platform.

In 2016, a customer tweeted that Vodacom “stole” 5GB from him and in 2015 another threatened to switch to a different provider “because Vodacom data disappears like nobody’s business”.

Even after the offer of free data to those affected, the Twittersphere was still not happy, with many users saying they had not seen their data balances going up by 500MB.