Vodafone fined £4m over phone credit top-up failure
Mobile phone company under fire over poor call handling service
ONE of Britain’s biggest mobile phone companies has been fined £4.6 million for failing to top up the credit on more than 10,000 payas-you-go users and handle customer complaints properly.
Vodafone, which has 19.5 million customers in the UK, cost 10,452 customers a total of £150,000 over 17 months after the credit was not loaded on to their accounts.
When the errors were spotted and people phoned up, customers service agents lacked “sufficiently clear guidance on what constituted a complaint”, Ofcom found in an investigation.
It added that they did not deal with these cases in an appropriate, fair or timely manner, according to an investigation by Ofcom.
The regulator’s consumer group director, Lindsey Fussell, said: “Vodafone’s failings were serious and unacceptable, and these fines send a clear warning to all telecoms companies.
Simon McCulloch, of consumer price comparision website comparethemarket.com, said the fine was a “wake-up call for the mobile phone industry”.
He added: “Mobile giants have been able to get away with poor levels of customer service and uncompetitive practices for too long, safe in the knowledge there is less likelihood this will be noticeable and therefore won’t prompt people to switch.”
Mr McCulloch said mobile phone users must always check their bills closely, query any apparent errors and if dissatisfied switch to a new provider.
Ofcom launched two probes into the errors and mishandling of complaints which took place between January 2014 and November 2015, and December 2013 and April 2015, respectively.
The conglomerate was fined £3.7m for failing to credit the customers’ accounts and a further £925,000 after it found it did not comply with rules on customers complaint handling.
Vodafone apologised for its failings saying it deeply regretted them and promised to improve services.
A spokesman said: “We are completely focused on serving our customers: everyone who works for us is expected to do their utmost to meet our customers’ needs, day after day, and act quickly and efficiently if something goes wrong.
“It is clear from Ofcom’s findings that we did not do that often enough or well enough on a number of occasions. We offer our profound apologies to anyone affected by these errors.”
The company said it has fully refunded or recredited more than 10,422 customers an average of £14.35 each, and has made a £100,000 donation to a number of UK charities in lieu of being able to track down the remaining affected customers.
Ofcom said it took Vodafone’s customer reimbursement plans and willingness to enter into formal settlement into account, cutting the company’s fine by 7.5 per cent as a result.
Vodafone blamed the pay-asyou-go credit failure on a “complex IT migration” that involved moving more than 28.5 million customer accounts to a new system, leading to some mistakes in billing data and price plans and a sharp rise in complaints.