My poor elderly Aunt got scammed recently. Some overseas crime syndicate has been repeatedly calling her on her Vodafone landline, so we decided to get the landline number cancelled and a get Vodafone to create a new landline number for her.

English is not her first language, so I have been helping her out. You would think getting this sorted would take one phone call to Vodafone. Think again.

On 14 January I call Vodafone customer support. I explain the situation, that my Aunt is in her mid seventies and needs to stop these scam callers.

I requested that they replace my Aunt's landline number. The first person I talked to did not seem to have a clue how to organize this and hung up on me.

So I call back and after a wait get put through to somebody else. This person also seemed similarly clueless and the call was terminated (not by me).

I rang a third time. This time I got somebody who sounded a little more intelligent, and he said that he will cancel my Aunt's landline and get a new number installed, and that it would take about 5 working days. At last I thought we were making progress.

Nothing happens over the next week, so I called back 28 January. The person I talked to said that she could see that my Aunt's landline had been cancelled, but she could not see any order for a new number to be installed. She said that she would organise this and send me an email confirming this in a few minutes. I hang up. After 10 minutes there is no email from Vodafone. By this stage I have no faith in the competency of Vodafone call centre staff, so I call back and request that they confirm that a new number has been ordered for my Aunt. I get cut off.

I am now fuming, cursing under my breath to never recommend to anybody to use Vodafone (I had foolishly recommended them to my Aunt a decade ago).

I called back up, selected Tech Support and spoke to somebody who sounded quite intelligent. He said that he could see that there was an order in place to get a new landline number installed on my Aunt's account, and said that this would be made a priority and would be done within 2 working days.

Now it is 2nd February and my elderly aunt still has no working landline thanks to these bumbling and incompetent fools.

This level of customer service is totally unacceptable.

Vodafone, you maybe saving costs by having an overseas call centre, but you are destroying your reputation due to the extremely low quality of service.

We will give them to the end of this week to get this sorted. If there is not a satisfactory result we will cancel the account.

I have given up on calling Vodafone customer support. I will only speak with somebody based in New Zealand.