Still As Life

As you may recall, on the 4th of December, I joined up to the Vodafone 5GB wireless modem package. This has been working out quite well, it has kept me sane these past couple of days where I would not normally have had the internet and would have been stuck with a certain person who I really cannot stand. Yay for technology and it's associated magic.

Anyway, I received my bill earlier in the month. If you read my earlier post, or have been looking at this plan yourself, you would know it is $39 a month for 5gb of data usage, regardless of whether you are on the 3G network or the GSM network. The $39 a month includes the USB modem or PCMCIA card (I suggest the USB modem) for free.

Now I received my bill and it was not for $39. It was for $40.29. This amount made no sense at all, my bill made no sense as it looked like I had been charged twice for the month, and neither of the numbers made sense.

I have just spent half an hour plus on the phone to customer care about this and was transferred backwards and forwards between 2 different departments 3 times! The first 2 had no idea at all, even though the first was billing enquiries and the second was data billing enquiries.

Neither of them had any idea.

Finally, I got transferred back to general billing enquiries and got a different customer service representative who seemed to know what she was talking about.

It seems that unlike the other providers I have experience with, Vodafone don't have billing cycles everyday, so when you join up to Vodafone, you are put into whatever the next billing cycle is. In my case, the next one was on the 5th, and then you are billed twice to make up the extra time before the billing cycle.

I had a feeling it was just something like this, but when you are billed for more than you are expecting it's nice to know why. It definitely should not have taken half an hour to find out though. Surely anyone in any of their billing departments should know something like this and could have told me straight up in less than 5 minutes.

The thing that makes it really annoying, is that I never had to wait for someone to answer when I rang and when I was transferred. They always picked up straight away, so the half an hour spent trying to find out was almost all spent speaking directly to someone, there was no waiting time at all in that.

Labels: rants