Vodafone – “The Worst Company in the History of the Earth” Bad customer service and the continuing concern over safe data storage is something that I feel passionately about. After personally going through a very distressing call with the telecoms giant Vodafone I decided that interrupting my usual blogs to inform others about their mistakes would be the right thing to do. It is shocking to see how little some large corporates value their customer service and I personally feel it is only right to highlight some of the fails from my own experience so that others can be extra vigilant and so that maybe businesses can learn. After learning in the classroom about how good customer service should be approached I find it interesting that in reality this is rarely how it happens. Following the massive amounts of data breaches over the last few years it is worrying to discover how a large company can still under value customers concerns over protecting their data and proceed to blatant lies in order to avoid staying past their closing time of 8pm. While many may argue that this is the case of only two call handlers I must highlight where my blog title came from. After the call, I looked at Trust Pilot and saw reviews from more than 4,000 Vodafone customers. Their star rating is 1 out of 5 with a mass of disgruntled customers writing bad reviews. The one that stood out was titled “The Worst Company in the History of the Earth” After reading these I kicked myself for not looking at this first. Customers receive false security thinking that such a large company must be successful for a reason - surely, they must get it right? Another reason for this blog is to carry out a social experiment for my studies. I am curious how much companies do value social media and how they are perceived on these platforms. I would be interested to see if Vodafone do respond to my social posts at all? I would like to invite Vodafone to respond with a formal apology and message of some reassurance to myself and the other thousands of upset customers on Trust Pilot. Will they really listen? Do they actually care? Watch this space….. Why Vodafone Failed …………….. FAIL 1: Vodafone cannot change the you have failed the credit check message because the volume of calls we would then receive would be unmanageable. (Never mind the damage telling people have failed the credit check will cause) FAIL 2: When passing a call from handler to handler no information was provided meaning a further 30 minutes was spent explaining things again. FAIL 3: Mohab called the credit team and then advised us that they had no pending applications at all. This proved that someone had lied to us, either the first lady or Mohab who had given us conflicting information. FAIL 4: After asking to speak to a manager we were told that we were not able to do that because we were not Vodafone customers. Is this any way to speak to potential new customers? FAIL 5: After continually assuring us they held no personal data on us we received texts and emails that later enabled us to log on and see our information. After this Mohab was able to read out bank details and much more. A distressing result. FAIL 6: After being on the phone for an hour and a half Mohab told us that he could not continue the call as they closed at 8pm and it was then 8:10pm. Not a good way to deal with concerned customers.