Vodafone and the angst of customer contact

Vodafone just asked me for feedback on my recent call to Liam on their tech support line.

I thought I'd post it here to see how many of you out there using the intertubes find themselves nodding in agreement, or experiencing a sense of deja-vu...

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"Dear Vodafone,

Liam himself was fantastic, within what he was able to do. But the whole system is flawed.

We got notified that we'd hit our broadband allowance after 2 days- and then AGAIN after 8 days- ridiculous!

I tried ringing- "unable to take your call at this time". Posted issue via your support page- no reply at all FOR A MONTH.

When I finally got the very helpful Liam on the phone, he said that the faulty usage issue was 'a known problem' -- superb, but why does it take me a month to find out about KNOWN problems? Why does your phone service kick me off, and then your email contact is a black hole?

It now appears the issue was posted in your forums (which Liam admitted wasn't exactly obvious) and even then it was under Network Issues (usage monitoring is a network issue??) and then under a misleading title ("Bandwidth Checker not displaying usage" is hardly "Faulty email demands about exceeding usage limits").

What was Liam allowed to do about it? Refund a whopping $10 and then assure me that, despite this, the bandwidth checking really was okay, send me a list of our usage that showed it was Vodafone's issue and not ours, and say that you were working to make the customer response faster.

As it took almost 2 months for our last issue to get replied to (with a full refund for another Vodafone error), excuse me if I'm cynical.

Liam's great- smart, friendly, capable. But do we both really need to suffer from Vodafone's monumentally pathetic response system? Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is akin to malice. Your system may not be aimed at completely pissing off your customers, but you could make good money licensing it to people who DO want to do that...

Now bugger off and do something about it.

Minty."