Things just don’t seem to be getting any better for Vodafone, with the Telco yesterday experiencing some major problems with their prepaid recharge options.
UPDATE: The glitch was fixed at about 10am this morning, according to a statement from Vodafone:
Our prepaid recharge system was restored at around 10am this morning. We are sorry for the inconvenience the system outage caused. From 3pm yesterday and until around 1pm today prepaid customers who have run out of credit have been able to make free calls and send free SMS to keep in touch with family and friends.
Customers with recharge vouchers that they have purchased and tried to apply (unsuccessfully) to their accounts can now be reapplied by calling 1511 or go to myvodafone.com.au and following the normal prompts.
In a post on the Vodafone blog yesterday morning, Vodafone announced:
We are currently experiencing a problem with the technology that allows our prepaid customers to apply recharge credit to their account. Prepaid customers with existing credit are able to make and receive calls as normal, however, the fault is preventing our customer service staff in-store and within our contact centre from manually applying prepaid recharge credit to our customers’ accounts. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible and we will let you know as soon as this issue is resolved, and new prepaid credit can be applied to your account. We apologise for the current inconvenience.
By 4:15pm, the problem was still in effect, but Cormac Hodgkinson, Director of Customer Service and Experience at Vodafone made a concession to prepaid customers:
Just wanted to let you know our prepaid recharge systems are still down, but in the meantime if you run out of credit we’ll make all your national standard voice calls free.
SMS is currently unavailable, but we’re working hard to make SMS also available, and we’ll let you know as soon as they are operational again and you need to recharge.
We know you rely on our service and we want to ensure we can keep you in touch with your family and friends. The calls will remain uncharged for those who run out of credit until we get our system back up and running.
Sorry for any inconvenience and we’ll keep you updated when more information comes to hand.
And at 7:24pm, Cormac backed up with the promise of free national SMS to prepaid customers out of credit until they fix the problem.
It’s a big blow to the network that has been criticised for poor network performance, been thrown up against the privacy commission and now this. Hope things turn around for the network soon…
[Vodafone]
Tahn
Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:09 AMI use them on a prepaid phone and also for wireless Internet. I have not had a problem with their network until the start of this week. Keeps dropping out and being sluggishly slow. Very irritating.
To top it off, I want to check my internet usage via the website and get this message:
“Please note: Due to an unscheduled system update, this information is only current as at 8am Friday 11th February.
This information should be updated by Friday 18th February.
For more up-to-date information, some customers are able to:
- Call 1512 for your current months remaining entitlements, or
- Call 1555 and selecting option 1 for touch tone, option 1 for accounts then option 2 for amount owing.
We apologise for any inconvenience.”
Avoid Vodafone at all costs, people!
glennc
Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:19 AMi am in the process of switching to amaysim as i am over vodafone
Tahn
Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:21 AMSorry to double post. When trying to contact 1512 with a text from my modem (obviously unable to dial) I get this message:
Vodafone apologises that this service is currently unavailable. You will be able to access this service by dialling 1512 at a later stage.
Gil
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:10 PMTried to recharge my mobile via voucher and now theres no “text and talk” option, which is what I’ve always been on. The choices are now narrowed down to three; Flexicap, Text and DATA, and Simplify. Get with it Vodaphone, if you want our money, which is what ALL business is based on, get and keep your act together, or our money will go to your oppisition.
Zahir
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 3:01 PMIt looks like the recharge gremlin has hit Vodafone again. Been unable to recharge an already purchased voucher for since 3 December now. 2 days and unable to make any calls.
Mike
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 12:03 PMI have been trying to recharge my prepaid account since 3 December. They didn’t say anything about the problems until the next day (not on their website, nor there was the automated message when you call 152) and I was worried up until I found the http://annystudio.com/misc/vodafone-problems/ blog and could see that I am not alone with this failure. It’s 7 December today, and every time I call to check my account, the same robot tell me that there are still problems with Vodafone recharge.