@JasonParis:

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Ok, I have now reached the end of my tether on this so apologies if this is a bit long winded.

About 6 years ago Auckland City Council changed our street number from xab to xyz.  Nothing else changed, just the number.  Physical location remains as it was.

Just to compound the issue, our physical location is not a mail deliverable address.  That is we cannot receive mail at our physical address (and as a consequence, in 95%+ of cases, cannot get courier deliveries either).  In lieu, NZ Post provide us with a PO Box.  I understand that by law/under their mandate/or whatever, they are required to provide deliveries to all NZ households.  Non-deliverable addresses are not exactly unheard of in rural NZ though (and even in some urban areas).

So we go through the laborious process of notifying all friends/relatives/business contacts etc of the change.  In 95%+ of cases that took just a single email or phone call to get the change made.  In a few cases it required 2 or 3 attempts over a year or so.  With one exception - Vodafone.

Despite at least eight and probably more like a dozen attempts over about six years, Vodafone still has not, and seems unable to correct the physical address.  That is despite multiple promises that it would be sorted.  I thought I had finally managed to get it sorted 2 - 3 years ago.  But about three weeks ago we had problems with our landline and in discussion with NZ based tech staff it turned out that they still had our old (now invalid) address in their system.  The first person I spoke to promised to fix it, then as we still needed to resolve our phone problem I was put onto a second NZ based staff member.  The agreed solution was for use to take out a new 12 month contract and get a new Ultra Hub modem as their testing showed our old HG659 was faulty.  To my surprise, in the follow up it turned out that our address was still incorrect.  The first person had not fixed it.  So painstakingly go through the whole process again, with the second person promising to fix it.  Then to finalise issues over the lack of landline service until the new modem arrived, I was forwarded onto yet another staff member.  Finalise of course meant going through all the details yet again (landline problems & new 12 month contract).  And of course yet again it transpired that our address was still incorrect. This turned out to be the longest call of all but the person I was speaking with seemed on the ball. 

The problem, it turned out, was that addresses cannot be added manually.  The address needs to be typed in and a match obtained with an address in the Vodafone address database, which I was told is obtained from NZ Post.  Despite repeated attempts, no match could be obtained for our physical address.  I even got the guy to go onto Google and NZ Post websites and type it in to show him that it is a valid physical address.  And indeed that NZ Post do have our correct physical address in their system.  After a very lengthy call/calls totaling about 4 hours that day, we finally sorted details of our new 12 contract, and the tech person promised that (a) he would send through confirmation of the new contract details in 15 - 20 minutes, and (b) would follow up re the address issue, which would require it to be taken to a higher level so that it could be manually entered in.  A few days, still no confirmation email came through so I texted one of the others I had spoken to as she was waiting for confirmation so that she could organise our new modem.  Now about three weeks later still no confirmation and still no new modem.

So today I follow up yet again, this time speaking with Bombay staff.  Yet again, the Vodafone system still had our old incorrect address.  Again go through all the details with three separate support staff. This time I confined it to the address issue and of course they also were unable fix it.  They did not seem to have any record of my contact with Vodafone three weeks ago, including anything about the new 12 month contract. Eventually I gave up on it after over 1 hours on the call.  And no, they were not able to escalate the call back to NZ (or so they claimed).

So now 6 years down the track, and just one organisation in the world is not able to make a simple address correction - Vodafone NZ.  Six years and still not able to change it.

The problem it seems is that the address database Vodafone obtains from NZ Post includes only mail delivery addresses.  They then appear to use that database of deliverable addresses to validate our physical address, which of course they cannot do because our address is not a deliverable address. 

Yet NZ Post themselves do have a comprehensive address database that does include our address (it matches, but in the details box it states in big red letters "No postal delivery").  In fact, unlike Google Maps, the NZ Post database places the address pointer in map view directly over the centre of our house.  In Gmaps, it is at the road front, ~300m from our house.  So NZ post clearly have their own independent, comprehensive address database.  But Vodafone are clearly only buying the 'deliverable address' component.  All well and good for ensuring that postal addresses are valid but to use that same database to validate physical addresses is simple incompetence.  Yes, they have separate billing and situation address fields, and yes, they have our correct billing address (the PO Box).

In short, the system is broken.

X Squad?