Vodafail.com spills the beans to the ACCC & ACMA

Stuart Corner
Friday, 21 January 2011 06:09

IT Industry - Market

Adam Brimo, the creator of Vodafaiil.com - the web site set up for unhappy Vodafone customers - has submitted a 30 page report to th ACCC and ACMA summarising the problems that have afflicted its 12,000 members, and the responses they have received from Vodafone.

Brimo has made his report public, but is not commenting on it. However it has been welcomed by ACCAN with director of policy & campaigns, Elissa Freeman, saying: "Prior to Adam setting up Vodafail.com, many customers thought they were alone in experiencing problems because Vodafone failed to let people know what was going on'¦Adam deserves all of our thanks for his effort in setting up the Vodafail.com web site and taking a month out of his life to run it; moderating tens of thousands of comments and enabling features like crowdsourcing coverage maps and live data for on-hold wait times."

ACCAN said: "[Vodafone] has communicated very little directly to its customers since network problems began in October last year. Vodafone chief executive Nigel Dews made an apology via the Vodafone web site in late December, but'¦overall there has been an information vacuum surrounding the issues that has greatly exacerbated the telco's problems'¦Vodafail.com, and the subsequent report, documents customers' frustration and anger at Vodafone's seeming indifference to the network problems customers were experiencing and the telco's failure to properly handle complaints."

The report, 'Vodafone situation: yesterday, today and tomorrow,' analyses thousands of similar stories from customers about hours spent on hold to Vodafone's call centre trying to make a complaint about its 3G network issues including frequent call dropouts and delayed receipt of voicemail and text messages.

The report claims that, in many cases, customers were told by Vodafone customer service representatives that there were no known network issues and that the problems they were experiencing were related to their handset or SIM card.

Customers were told to reboot their phones, and, when that did not solve the problem, to go into a Vodafone store to pick up a new SIM card, which in most cases did not improve the situation.