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Vodafone fined £4.6m by Ofcom for 'serious and sustained' customer failings | |
(35 minutes later) | |
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. | |
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. | |
Its 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.” | |
Ofcom announced in June that it was investigating Vodafone for engaging, "in conduct contrary to the relevant conditions when selling pre-paid mobile telephony (PAYG) services to its PAYG customers and rendering bills to such customers that did not represent the true extent of the service actually provided to them". | |
The second part of the probe centred whether it had complaints handling procedures that were "transparent, accessible, effective, facilitate access to alternative dispute resolution and provide for appropriate record keeping". | |
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