Vodafone has been hit with a £4.6 million fine for failing to adequately handle customer complaints and providing poor service to pay-as-you-go customers, reports The Independent.
Telecoms regulator, Ofcom, found that 10,452 pay-as-you-go customers lost out when Vodafone failed to credit their accounts after they paid to ‘top-up’ their mobile phone credit. The affected customers collectively lost £150,000 over a 17-month period.
The company also breached billing rules because top-ups that consumers had bought did not show up in their pay-as-you-go credit balances.
To compound the problem, Vodafone failed to identify or address the problems and only acted after Ofcom intervened, the regulator said.
Vodafone, the UK’s most complained about mobile phone network, offered its “profound apologies” for the failures.
The second part of the probe found that Vodafone’s customer service agents were not given sufficiently clear guidance on what constituted a complaint.
Processes were “insufficient to ensure that all complaints were appropriately escalated or dealt with in a fair, timely manner”, Ofcom ruled.
Vodafone’s procedures also “failed to ensure that customers were told, in writing, of their right to take an unresolved complaint to a third-party resolution scheme after eight weeks”.
The company blamed the issues on a new IT system and said it had “fully refunded or re-credited” 10,422 pay-as-you-go customers out of the 10,452 affected. It said it was unable to track down the remaining 30 affected. In a statement, Vodafone said: “Everyone who works for us is expected to do their utmost to meet our customers’ needs”.
“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.”
Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom Consumer group director, said: “Vodafone’s failings were serious and unacceptable, and these fines send a clear warning to all telecoms companies.
“Phone services are a vital part of people’s lives, and we expect all customers to be treated fairly and in good faith. We will not hesitate to investigate and fine those who break the rules.”
