Vodafone's Pit-Stop

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#70244 10-May-2007 21:09

i have been a long time vodafone customer.... if the 755p Palm unit comes out on telecom within a month, im gone.

Account customers should be getting at least what prepay has, plus more.

richms

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#70286 11-May-2007 00:59

No mention on that page about problems closing accounts, so I can see it as business as usual at vodafone.

Richard rich.ms

alvinlee

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#70529 12-May-2007 21:49

Hi, long term, the changes will be a huge improvement in service delivery. with on-account and pre-pay systems merged, this will give vodafone the ability to provide better shop-front service. It is a huge change and will take some time to implement. But the end result will be significant.

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#70530 12-May-2007 21:54

alvinlee: Hi, long term, the changes will be a huge improvement in service delivery. with on-account and pre-pay systems merged, this will give vodafone the ability to provide better shop-front service. It is a huge change and will take some time to implement. But the end result will be significant.

Regardless of how "significant" the changes are, in this day of age the transition should be an overnight exercise......
The next time the eft-pos system is updated I dare say you don't see down time of a month.
The two system should be ready to go with the flick of a switch

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richms

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#70533 12-May-2007 22:11

They have had years to make these changes, the deadlines they give for swapping from prepay to an account have lapsed 3 times with nothing on offer. Its almost mid 2007, I was first told sometime in 2005 was when it would be available.

Clearly incompetence is king at vodafone. as already mentioned, a bank would never try to pull this carry on with weeks of reduced service levels.

Richard rich.ms

alvinlee

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#70540 12-May-2007 22:42

The changes vodafone are making will mean a huge improvement to services and features to both on-account and pre pay customers. whats a little pain for an overall gain? And yes, banks have made similar changes, which have been much longer than overnight.

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#70541 12-May-2007 22:47

I don't see westpac or ASB saying 'Due to a system upgrade, we'll still let you withdraw funds... but we won't be able to tell you your balance for a month and a half. Remember, you'll still be responsible for any charges (failed bill payment/auto payment/dishonoured cheque fees/overdraft charges)!'

Instead it should be a seamless migration for the customer. Its been done before - can't it be done now?

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#70543 12-May-2007 22:53

alvinlee: whats a little pain for an overall gain? And yes, banks have made similar changes, which have been much longer than overnight.

This is non-sense. I've been involved in larger projects within telcos and any transition period of more than a few hours is just out of this world.

Telecom New Zealand has been migrating their billing and charging systems, migrated its prepaid with millions of accounts, and is migrating the voice mail platform, but never they came out with this "six weeks with no access to your account information or no possibility of changes" thing.

It's just bad planning altogether.

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alvinlee

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#70544 12-May-2007 22:57

Because this is such a huge change over, I believe vodafone are giving themselves a bit of "space" in case the worst happens. If the change over is reasonably painless, it will probably only take a week, at the most two. Once it's over, billing will be much more "real time" than before.

Filterer

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#70545 12-May-2007 22:59

Yea thats right Mauricio, I believe that Telecom did the prepay billing system upgrade in the early hours of one morning, virtually no disruption to anyone.

In this day in age the system and in general most commercial systems are, setup so an upgrade requires little more then switching the service between two computers or the like. Now a slight oversimplification from an engineers point of view, but the end experience should be the same to the customer

edit: "Space" is the few hours between 2am and 6am after you flick the switch ;0

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#70546 12-May-2007 23:00

As I said, I've seen many changes. I've been through biggers ones. Telecom New Zealand is still going through a three/four year long project changing billing, charching, prepaid, voice mail. Things are done behind the scenes, there's no "pit stop".

I really think this just shows bad planning and IT execution.

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#70547 12-May-2007 23:05

If I remember rightly this isn't the first time Vodafone has made changes to their billing system and left customers for a long time without access to account info

Nightwyrm

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#70560 13-May-2007 10:39

alvinlee: whats a little pain for an overall gain? And yes, banks have made similar changes, which have been much longer than overnight.

There's one small difference there. When we upgraded our credit card system, it was carefully planned and developed over a year - the testing alone took 3-4 months. All work was conducted in either a development or test environment, which was well away from the 'live' environment. All of this had a target implementation weekend set months in advance, with rollback contingencies built in, and the actual implementation (i.e. the 'switching over') only took hours - not the weeks proposed by VFNZ.

All a large-scale IT implementation like this takes is a bit of careful planning. In the normal project methodology, the bulk of work for a project is done in the initial phases i.e. the planning phases. When my organisation conducts a project like this, out first consideration is how we can implement the solution with minimal customer disruption. IT Project Managers at my work think that this looks to be poorly planned, with little consideration to the end user (i.e. us).

(p.s. Admittedly banking organisations will do things differently from each other but this is how my work plays it.)

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#70561 13-May-2007 10:42

I used to work with the TNZ VSP, and Unisys have a replica of the platform (no details to be disclosed here) just for development and testing. Deployment of small change request required weeks of preparation and testing, while large projects could take up to a couple of years (I was involved in one such a project from 1997 through 2001 - a single project).

Never we had an outage of six weeks to deploy any new feature.

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#70573 13-May-2007 13:52

Vodafone's web site makes a very vague reference to account and usage information "not being up to date" during the transition. Does anyone know exactly what is meant by this? Do they mean that account information could take a few hours more than usual to be updated? Or a few days more than usual? Or will balances be totally unreliable throughout this period?

I'm contemplating whether I should arrange some alternative method of monitoring my 3G broadband usage during this period as I definitely don't want to be hit with those massive excess charges that I would incur if I were to go over 2Gb!

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