Had an interesting experience with Vodafone yesterday which I thought I would share.

"Someone" at my employers decided that my mobile number was "No longer needed", and requested that Vodafone disconnect it yesterday.  Since my employer is reasonably sized and mostly based off-shore for internal support I had no idea who within my company to contact about this.

As I have never had to contact Vodafone since I was given my phone by my employer.

Rang Vodafone on the 0800 800 021 number since I had a XT Datacard Sim card which thankfully my phone supports WCDMA 850.  Spent about 15 mins on hold before I got transferred through to a very unhelpful Business CSR who refused to help me at all since I didn't know my Pin Number, and very very reluctantly gave out a few names within my employers who were nominated contacts in the Vodafone system only after I had badgered her sufficiently to say that that the fact that my mobile was disconnected was a big problem.  Including a few very challenging Malay names for her to spell out.

So then I tried to track these people down internally and got voice mail for all of them.

At this stage I had been offline for I think about an hour.  I am on-call this week and bad things would have happened if I had missed a Sev1 case.  I was thinking .... this, I've been complaining to move to XT and this just confirms why I should do it.

So, ring back Business Helpdesk again, this time got an extremely helpful and I would say polar opposite experience from the first time.  She said she was e-mailing the Vodafone corporate account manager and he should contact me within 15 mins.  Plus she went through the list and gave me all the english sounding internal company contacts plus who was the primary contact.

She rung me back 10 mins later saying the Account Manager was busy and he would ring me within the half hour.

Got rung back by the CSR 25 mins later saying the account has been re-activated and wanted me to check it was active, and a minute after that by the Account Manager checking to make sure I really still worked for my employer, and saying he had re-activated the account, and it should be back on now.

So.... What's the moral of the story.

If you don't get the service from the first CSR, hang up and try again.  And always ask for names.