Vectone have offered 3GB of free data to customers who have experienced intermittent signal problems over the last couple of days.
This seems quite fair, given that O2 has had a fair few problems recently and not compensated customers in a very proactive way.
Does this make it right? Well according to their Facebook page, there seem to be a lot of very frustrated customers who have experienced many more than two days of zero service. In many of these cases there seem to be a lot of customers who have experienced the not-so-great customer service (or lack of it) from Vectone.
Will I be taking Vectone up on their offer of 3GB of data? Not a chance. The EE network where I live and work is virtually unusable for calls, let alone data.
What annoys me is that the email that I received from them has the tagline: "For our customers, we care".
Now, I know that there are many people who love Vectone's £10 a month unlimited everything bundle, but their customer service has always left a lot to be desired.
I don't use Vectone or Delight Mobile any more for this exact problem - My number stopped accepting calls and they did nothing to help me, and it took them three whole weeks to reply to my original email. I didn't get an apology, credit, or a viable solution.
These customer reviews mirror much of what is being said on Vectone's Facebook page.
Maybe some people will hang in there for unlimited everything for £10 a month - It is after all an incredibly good deal, and easily the best value out there at the moment. But how much are you willing to pay for a service which is so poor?
If it was free, you could accept a few issues and maybe use the SIM as a backup or for data only, but for many people £10 a month is plenty to pay for your monthly mobile usage, and you don't expect there to be serious outages, except maybe a local issue on very rare occasions.
Many people want lots of data these days, but poor Vectone (and Delight Mobile) customers must be realising that being able to make and receive phone calls is vitally important, too.
The more people ditch their landlines in favour of their mobiles mean that network operators must do more to prevent problems like this from ever occurring.
Ok, Vectone say that they were upgrading their system to "ensure a better service for the future", but that doesn't mean that you can ignore your customers when you accidentally switch off the lights. It also helps if you acknowledge the problem, and not pretend that it was an intermittent problem that lasted "a couple of days".
Good customer care can save companies when they do make mistakes, and it looks like Vectone didn't do enough on this occasion.
Of course, many Vectone customers will be using the £10 unlimited everything bundle - 3GB of free data for them is a slap in the face, and I'm sure that they would much prefer a free bundle, which might even stop customers from requesting their PAC code and leaving.
My PAYG and bundle evaluation website http://mobile-networks-uk.weebly.com/ does list both Vectone and the sister company Delight Mobile as being good value; but aren't you willing to pay more for reliability and good customer service?
