Vodacom: This is what your brand is.
In an earlier rant I spoke about the Vodacom rebrand. In summary I said that brands are built by the customer experience and that because of the high involvement of customers in the Vodacom brand and how simple it would be to tell them about the logo change that the bulk of the money spent on the rebrand was wasted and would be far better used to improve service levels after all the offer inherent in the rebrand is better service.
- Over the weekend I went to get a micro sim for the iPad I had passed on to my daughter, I went to Fourways to get one but there were no micro sims available in Fourways, according to the guy at the Vodashop at any store.
- On Monday I drove to another shopping centre this was around a 20 minute drive, they had one, but in order to get it activated the clerk needed to call Vodacom, after 10 or so minutes I decided to video him holding on. The video is below:
(download)
This poor man has obviously to put up with this day after day, and the queue of customers in this store laid out as friendly as the post office would agree with me. Hopefully Vodacom will realise that this attitude is a reflection of Vodacom not this otherwise helpful chap.
Vodacom you can paint building tops red, make blue rugby teams play in red jersey's you can even give away red cell phones or spend millions of rands in the media. This is what your customers and staff experience day after day.
This is the Vodacom positioning and anything you say on TV, Radio and Billboards doesn't matter, because in a real time always connected world.
Your Brand is what we (Your customers) say it is.
Update 1: Vodacom give 24hrs as the standard time to activate a sim card. This micro sim card was specifically set up as a data sim. So 32 hours later I call the call centre to find that data is barred. The call centre agent says it will take another 24 hours, then calls to say that he has sorted it on his side - about an hour should do it. That was 10 hours ago - I guess I need to call the call centre again.
Update 2: Some rocket scientist at vodacom decided that instead of doing a card activation - a sim swap would be in order. So now I have lost data connection on my primary account sim card. They suggested I now needed to get a replacement card from the store on the other side of town. Have insisted that that deliver the card to me as a replacement for my primary card.
I really think that this is an ordinary part of the vodacom business - activating a sim card - why has it taken days and multiple phone calls to get it done.
Walter Pike
