Post: O2: avoid like the plague
In my previous post, I said that I may make the occasional post before then should something particularly interesting crop up
. Well, something interesting has cropped up. A word of warning: while I will try to control myself, this post may contain words unsuitable for pregnant women or those of a nervous disposition.
I received a letter this morning from a company named Moorcroft Debt Recovery Limited informing me that I owed O2 the princely sum of £14.62 and that, if necessary, they intended to commence litigation to get it back. This is never a letter one wishes to receive, especially before one has had breakfast, and especially given the numerous unpleasant experiences one has had with O2 in the past.
Such a letter was also rather confusing since, to my knowledge, all my contracts with O2 have been based on a direct debit scheme, so any money owed should have been taken directly from my bank account. O2 had also not got in touch with me about this before, which would seem the sensible course of action.
After phoning O2’s customer support helpline (being transferred in the process between three departments and having to give my details and a description of the problem three times) it turns out that the final payment from my previous contract didn’t go through due to the direct debit ending. A slightly annoying technical glitch, but fair enough. What isn’t fair enough is that O2, despite having my name, e-mail address, home phone number, mobile phone number and home address, somehow didn’t bother to get in touch with me about this and instead proceeded directly to the “get your friendly neighbourhood debt collectors to threaten litigation” stage. This implies either extreme incompetence or a policy of treating one’s customers like shit. Neither would surprise me; neither is acceptable.
Were I a bad debtor, this might have proven an effective method of O2 getting their money back. As it is, it has proven an effective method of O2 losing a customer. This is the last in a long series of straws: when my contract comes up for renewal (sadly not for another 8 months) it will most definitely not be with O2. To anyone considering O2 as a mobile provider, I would strongly suggest that you consider someone else. Anyone else.
As we discussed earlier, I’ll likely be moving to Vodafone within the next few months, as my o2 contract came up for renewal within the last month or so.
A word of advice to anyone else in the market for new phones and considering the Motorola Razr: don’t bother unless you plan to do naught but call and send SMS messages.
The software is pretty naff, and Motorola’s APIs are, apparently, abysmal (hence a lack of support for the phone in Salling Clicker, and various idiotic issues in BluePhoneElite). Further, if you try to circumvent said issues by doing something as simple as saving your old SMS messages (that you’d rather like to keep and archive with the aforementioned BluePhoneElite) to your SIM, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised: no such function exists. Further, the messages aren’t on the SIM, and don’t try putting it into another phone to find out if they are – it will promptly eat them all.
A beautiful phone marred by an utterly shit piece of software, and a potentially great network (in terms of price and features) marred by utterly stupid customer support agents, policies, and, in fact, everything else.
… and suprise suprise, my number still hasn’t transferred. The lying fucks.
Although, I have to take that back. For some reason my old phone just hadn’t twigged that its SIM was inactive so the number has transferred as promised. Not so bad after all.
Yeah, they’re a bit crap, but noone else offers the same thing as cheaply :-\
its all a bit of a shame really – you would hoipe that the mobile phone companies could have learnt a thing or two from the landline operators but no – its merely a pipe dream
to date I have been on orange, one-2-one (now T-mobile) and 3.. orange to their credit didnt do too bad a job as an operator but their ability to QA their phones was appalling – the Orange phones when they came out were always much too buggy to use
I blamed Orange, should probably have blamed the manufacturer but anyhow..
3 is awful, why I persuaded myself they might be better is beyond me. I was considering O2 but I guess I’ll jump straight to Vodafone.. not that I have heard much good about them either..