Doing good

So by now you’ve gathered that Virgin Mobile is in my shit books and that I’ve also taken the steps to cancel my contract.

That’s done and dusted (I hope).  But now I have a dilemma:

You see, over the ten months that I’ve been on my Virgin Mobile contract I’ve been accumulating a lot of roll-over airtime from month to month (more than I use quite honestly). 

To date I’m sitting with just over R2,500’s worth of unused paid-for airtime that I have to use up or risk losing if I port to Vodacom any time soon.  According to Virgin Mobile’s new expiry policy, my airtime will expire soon as well (even though I’ve paid for it) so I need to offload it pretty quickly

My initial thought was to sell the airtime to another Virgin mobile victim at a 40% discount but seeing as though there haven’t been any takers as yet, I’ve decided to make something good come of this horrible situation.

So, on 1 September 2009, to celebrate Spring Day and in the spirit of creating good Karma, I have decided to donate my airtime to charity by SMSing various charity-related premium-rated SMS numbers.

My dilemma is that I only know of so many charities.  So far I’ve made donations to:

• The WSPCCA
• Choc
• The SA Guide Dog’s Association
• Sunday Times “Story Time”

But there must be others?

Here’s what I want you to do.  Follow me on Twitter and tell me about a charity you’d like me to support.

Obviously I’d like to keep a portion of the airtime for my own personal use until I can port, but the more good I can do, the better.

My only pre-requisites are that: it’s a valid South African charity (your kids don’t count as a charity), the charity does not collect my mobile number and use it to spam me and that it’s not a monthly “subscription service”. 

I only want to do once-off donations, but I WILL make repeat donations to a charity if they are nominated more than once.

I’ll make sure all donations are logged on Twitter under the #virginairtimeoffload hashtag.

Aaaannnddd…GO!

Virgin Mobile fiasco – update #5 (closure, HOPEFULLY)

Dare I tempt fate and say it, but I think I’m finally free of Virgin Mobile.  I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I took a page out of a colleague’s book and made such a nuisance of myself that hopefully they just hurried up the process.

Here’s how it went down:

27/08/2009

You’ll remember that I spoke to “Cole” and the story he gave me.  Well, after I lodged the complaint on Hellopeter I decided to give the call centre another call and just see for myself what the heck was happening.

Honestly, Cole was a smooth-talking fellow, but I didn’t believe one word coming out of his mouth, so I thought I’d try for a second opinion.  Wishful thinking?  Perhaps, but I was quite surprised when I made this phone call.

• 16h09 – Called contact centre, spoke to “Jodene”. Very helpful, very professional, a little more clued-up and pleasant to deal with than some of the other monkeys that staff Virgin mobile’s call centre.

  ME: “Hi Jodene.  I asked to have my post-paid account to be migrated to pre-paid 3 days ago and this has not happened.  What’s taking so long?”
  Jodene: “Hi.  Let me see.  Sir, I’ll have to check with my supervisor, please hold.”
  *Puts me on hold for about 3 minutes*
  Jodene: “Sir, your migration will happen at the end of the month”
  ME: “Okay, that’s fine, but can you make sure that the payments I made are reflecting and that I will NOT be debited on the 1st?”
  Jodene: “You will not be debited if all the payments are allocated. It seems that all is in order.”
  ME: “Jodene, thanks.  Can I ask that you send me an e-mail with everything you just said – that the migration will go through on the 1st, that all payments have been allocated and that I will NOT be debited on the 1st?”
  Jodene: “Sure, what’s the address?”
  ME /gives/ her address, spells it all out twice.
  ME: “Thanks Jodene, I appreciate your help.”
  Jodene: “It’s a pleasure sir, goodbye.”

  At this point I was asked to rate the service and I said that I was satisfied.  Although, i never received that e-mail that Jodene said she would send to me.  I suppose if I had received perfect service from Virgin Mobile I would have been dreaming.

28/08/2009

I quickly popped off to my local FNB Premier Banking suite to put a stop payment order on the Virgin Mobile debit orders, just in case they decided to carry on taking my money for a service that I had already cancelled. 

Overkill, perhaps, but I wasn’t going to take the chance of letting a debit order go through and then sit with a 3-month battle to get a refund. 

My banker said all was in order and that Virgin was not going to get any more of my money without my permission.  Yayness.

• 12h14 – I was in a client meeting so I missed a call from Virgin Mobile in response to my post on Hellopeter.  I got a pretty garbled voicemail that said something along the lines of: “Your account migration has been done and your bank account will not be debited.”  Admittedly the line was pretty bad and the guy leaving the message wasn’t the best English speaker, but I got the gist of the message.
• 13h15 – Did a balance enquiry on my phone to check if my account had been migrated.  First I did a “Credit Account” balance query and it gave me my airtime balance, so I immediately thought that my account was not migrated.  But I then did a “Prepaid Account” query and instead of the usual “Oops, you are a credit account holder…” I got a prepaid balance.  Could it be? Has it happened?

I’m not one to count my eggs before they hatch, so I’m reserving my cry of “FREEDOM!!!” for when I have successfully ported to Vodacom.

Until then, I have about R2,800’s worth of unused Virgin Mobile Airtime to offload.  Thinking of offering it up at a 40% discount to whoever wants it.  I’ll just do an airtime transfer and use the cash to save up for that R3,000 pay-in on a new iPhone 3GS – when there’s actually stock in SA.

Virgin Mobile fiasco – Update #3

And it continues:

26 August 2009

• 10h50 – Called Virgin Mobile’s call centre. Got through to “Tsego”.  Gave her my reference number.

  Tsego: “You requested to have your account migrated to pre-paid.”
  Me: “Yes.”
  Tsego: “I see that they have not received the request to do so yet.  When did you put the request in?”
  Me: “48 hours ago”
  Tsego: “The process usually takes 3 days.”
  Me: “I was told 48 hours.”
  Tsego: “No sir, it takes 3 days.”
  Me: “Not what I was told previously, but okay.”
  Tsego: “You can try and call us again tomorrow.”
  Me: *sigh* “Okay, thanks.”

To quote an acquaintance: “Virgin take instructions like cats take to herding.”

The Virgin Mobile fiasco – Update #1

So I thought I’d document my experiences cancelling that God-forsaken Virgin Mobile contract that I had to suffer through for the last 10 months (See here and here).

18 August 2009

• 12h44 – called Virgin Mobile call centre (123) and spoke to “Conrad”.  Very nice guy – helpful and happy.  Informed me that to cancel my contract all I would have to do is pay the outstanding balance on my handset and convert my post-paid account into pre-paid.  “Then you can port out but you’ll lose your accumulated airtime, which is sitting at R3078.”

20 August 2009

• 10h00 – called Virgin Mobile again, put through to billing enquiries.  Spoke to a “Emmaleen”.  I asked what the process was to cancel my contract.  She said that I must make the final payment for my handset, then fax confirmation through so that she can have the payment allocated against my account. 

  Emmaleen: “But we can’t allocate your payments today, our systems are down.”
  Me: “Your systems are always down.”
  Emmaleen: “Okay, bye.”

• 10h19 – Made payment into Virgin Mobile’s Nedbank account.  Faxed proof of payment through.
• 11h00 – Receive a phone call from Emmaleen confirming receipt of fax.  She informs me that an invoice for September has already been generated and payment for September is still due.

  Emmaleen: “Would you like to pay immediately and then we can cancel your debit orders or do you want to wait until your debit order comes off and cancel later?”
  Me: “No, please cancel it immediately.”
  Emmaleen: “Okay, as soon as you make that payment I’ll send it through to our payments department and we’ll allocate those for you”
  Me: “But if I make a payment now, won’t it affect the amount I paid to settle my handselt?”
  Emmaleen: “That’s up to our ‘WOW’ department who will sort that out.”
  Me: “Okay”. – but secretly inside I’m saying “Oh gods, here we go…”

• 11:11 – Made another payment to Virgin Mobile for September’s invoice and faxed through proof of payment.  Received e-mail confirmation from Emmaleen that she has received faxes and is allocating payments.

Bye bye Virgin Mobile!

 

Here’s the reason this is such a huge thing for me.  I’ve spent the last 14 months horribly regretting ever signing up with Virgin Mobile and today I did some calculations and realised that if I cancelled my agreement, I would actually be saving money for the next few months. 

Some of you (*koff* @ambio) would say that it’s about bloody time.

You see, I’m on a fairly high-end package (R599 per month) and every time I think about parting ways with that amount of money for a service that is well below average, I keep thinking that I could be on Vodacom with an iPhone 3GS, enjoying all the benefits of an HSDPA network that actually works and hopefully a network operator that has a bit more of a clue about customer service – while paying a lot less per month – R249 to be exact if I go the Weekender option.

One good thing about Virgin Mobile (*gasp*) is that they don’t tie you into contracts like Vodacom or MTN.  All you have to do is pay for your handset and you’re free to go – no additional cancellation fees or penalties.

Anyway, I’ve passed the mid-point of my contract and I’ve worked out that if I were to pay off my handset using the budget facility on my credit card, I could switch my account to prepaid and just be left paying off  my handset over a much shorter period of time.

The down side is that I have about R3,000’s worth of unused airtime on my account that I would lose if I ported immediately, so I’m going to have to suffer through a few more months with Virgin Mobile just to make sure it’s not money wasted (as if any money paid to Virgin Mobile ISN’T wasted.)

But the upside is that I’m finally on the path to freedom and I’m saving money in the process.  And in a few months I’ll be able to port, get my iPhone and hopefully endure less of a nightmare.

My only concern now is if the monke…*erm* /PEOPLE/ at Virgin Mobile can process the cancellation and stop the debit orders immediately, or if I have another 6-month battle with them on the cards to get the debit order cancelled like these poor buggers.

I’ll keep you posted.

(*does small dance of joy*)…

Why Virgin Mobile South Africa sucks…

If you’re one of my followers on Twitter or you’re a friend of mine on Facebook (or even if you know me in the real world), you’ll know of my deep-seated dislike of Virgin mobile South Africa.

I was a very loyal MTN subscriber for close-on 10 years but as has been the case with MTN, the gradual fall in customer service quality and the general lack of concern the company has for keeping its existing customers happy over acquiring new one – and I decided to cancel my decade-old contract for “greener pastures”

Virgin Mobile had all the great promises – the lowest call rates in South Africa, no contract tie-ins, free text messages, true per-second billing and a very low per/MB rate for its data traffic.  Heck, they even had the phone I wanted so badly at that point in time (Nokia E90), so it looked like heaven compared to MTN.

I suppose I should have noticed the first warning signs when it took me three visits to the Virgin Mobile Sandton City retail store in order to sign up for the package that I wanted.

Two of the three times I was told that “the system is down” – an excuse that would become the most spoken phrase at Virgin Mobile over coming months – even if they didn’t know it yet.

I eventually ended up signing a 24-month package with Virgin Mobile.  And so began my slow decent into mobile phone hell.

And here’s why:

• After about 3 months, my Nokia died and had to be sent in for repair. It took Virgin Mobile over a month to fix a simple software glitch – FAIL
• In October 2008, Virgin Mobile “migrated to a new system”, which sent their billing and other systems into total disarray. To date, errors that were caused by the system migration still persist and the migration is still being blamed by call centre agents as the cause for billing and Vrewards problems – FAIL
• On the subject of Vrewards – the system has been broken from day one. Virgin Mobile claims that its Vrewards have real cash value – which they initially did. But later Virgin Mobile decided to change these “real cash” Vrewards to airtime, which is now credited to your account – even though the pre-recorded message on their phone lines still claims that their Vrewards have “real cash value” – FAIL
• Free unlimited SMS packages were falsely advertised as so and are now subject to a draconian “fair usage policy” – FAIL
• Virgin Mobile piggy-back on Cell C’s GSM network as a virtual network operator. Cell C’s network is not the best when it comes to coverage and quality of service – and as a result dropped calls, “Network Busy” errors and terrible data speeds are a sad reality for Virgin Mobile subscribers – FAIL
• The claimed “super fast” data network is based on Cell C’s Edge network and is slow, continually times out and has some of the biggest latency issues I’ve ever seen. 3G is not even on Cell C’s radar – EPIC FAIL
• Earlier this year, Virgin decided to “bring it’s 1-year free itemised billing” to an end and automatically slapped R20 extra onto my account – which, despite having been asked to stop it, is still being charged to my account – FAIL
• The average hold time on Virgin mobile’s call centre line is 20 minutes – FAIL
• The company’s call centre agents have no power whatsoever – they continually over-promise and under deliver, never call back when they promise to do so and are merely a mechanism for blaming continual system problems for the ongoing issues that Virgin Mobile has. – FAIL
• Virgin Mobile’s network is horribly broken. It takes numerous attempts to make a call. “Network Busy” seems to be Virgin’s new payoff line. – FAIL

There are all sorts of rumours going around about the future of Virgin mobile in South Africa – especially because of uncertainty around Cell C’s future and I, for one, am scratching together every cent I have to get myself out of this God-forsaken 24-month agreement.

Admittedly, all I need to do is pay the outstanding balance on my phone and Virgin will “set me free” (unlike the jail sentence that MTN or Vodacom tie you into when you sign a contract with one of them) – there are no penalties for cancelling contracts early.

The only thing is, with the total and utter incompetence that Virgin Mobile staff demonstrate on a daily basis, am I willing to take the risk of paying R3,500 to Virgin to cancel my agreement and then sit with a six-month battle to stop the debit orders and subsequent wrongful credit bureau blacklisting that Virgin is all too happy to slap onto innocent people.

We’ll have to see.  But one thing is certain, Virgin Mobile is doomed to failure if they carry on the way they do – and I’ll put money on it, by 2010, they’ll be gone.

Richard Branson would be ashamed.