I’ve been a customer with Orange/Hutch/Vodafone for about 5 years now. In between I had an Airtel connection as well but had to cancel that as they were the absolute pits - but that’s another story. Anyway, my point is I loved Orange, I loved Hutch .... no network troubles, no problems with customer service .... but now in the last one week my experience with Vodafone has been so bad that I am seriously considering cancelling my numbers.

I have two post paid numbers on a Vodafone group talk account. My woes began when I decided to add a third number to the account last week. After completing all the necessary formalities the third number was activated. Unfortunately, CLIP had not been activated on the third number so I sent a request for activation of CLIP. On the evening of the 15th of February, CLIP became active oin the third number nad both the other two numbers went dead! We rushed to a Vodafone mini store where they expressed their inability to help and told us to call the customer care no. 111.

I called up customer care thrice .... the first time they listened to my problem and then cut the call. "No problem", I thought to myself, "probably just a technical glitch." So I called them up again. This time they put me on hold while they tried to solve the problem. After being put on hold for half an hour (I swear I am not kidding) I lost it and disconnected the call. Undaunted I called them up yet again and this time again I was put on indefinite hold until I finally cut the call.

The next day I decided to go to the main vodafone store in 4 Bungalows. They have a token system at their store and it took a good hour before one of the customer care representatives was free to attend to my problem. All this inspite of the fact that there weren’t many customers to attend to. Anyway, the executive wasvery polite and a bit confused, but after a lot of head-scratching and "I’ll be right back sir" acts she finally informed me that the problem would be sorted in 48 hours.

Come 48 hours I’m right back at the store waiting for the obligatory hour because my phones are still not working. Same executive, sweet as ever, extremely contrite, tries to solve my problem again and finally after making some calls tells me that the phones will be fixed in 15 mintues. So I walk out of the store and sure enough in 15 minutes one of the phones is till working, but the other is still dead!!! Arrrgghhh!

Third day back at the store, my phone has now been dead for a week. The executive I was dealing with is not in, so after the obligatory one hour wait I have to explain the whole thing to another exectuive who just doesn’t seem to get it. He takes my phone and disappears for an hour. At last he’s back and my phone is finally fixed.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful, be very, very careful if you plan on getting a vodafone connection. The change from Hutch to Vodafone is not a change in name only. It seems to be part of a well orchestrated effort to downgrade their services.

Branch Visited:	4 Bungalows
Plan Name:	Group Talk Plan
Plan Type:	Post Paid