A rant and a minor tip about Vodafone in Germany

Okay this is a rant, but I've left two hot tips for you if you read it. 🙂

Today I got an SMS that I was charged 1eur by a company I never heard of, through Vodafone Payments. If you never heard about Vodafone Payments that makes two of us. I never use that.

Anyway I wanted to call Vodafone to get it cancelled and turn off their useless payment service. Here started my trip to customer service hell:

• They have many numbers. The main hotline number doesn't take calls from CallYa pre-paid customers because they are poor and dirty, and not worthy of using the hotline.
• Instead there is a CallYa hotline, which of course charges you by minute, but even when I wanted I couldn't use it, because auto-responder tells me to press 3 for customer service and if I press three it tells me that is not a valid option. Neat.
• So having both ways of contacting them blocked, and me really not wanting to write a fucking letter in year 2024, I called their "Beraten & Bestellen" number to at least let them know their shit is broken.
  • After I explained, first agent told me to wait and the call disconnected immediately.
  • I told second one what happened, he told me to wait. Music played for 3 minutes. Call disconnected.
  • Third one was brain-dead. I can't give a clinical diagnosis but this one really doesn't take a neurologist to say. After 5 minutes of back and forth my guy told me "if it's just one euro, that's no big deal". Yep. This one I hung up on.
  • I talked to three more of them.
  • At least 2 of the 6 or so agents I talked to tried to sell me shit, usually contracts. Then hung up on me.
  • After a certain point I asked one of the agents if he speaks English because I thought maybe my German is the problem. He promptly reminded me "we are in Germany and in Germany people talk German." How nice of him.
  • One guy suggested me to just throw this SIM away and get a new one. Of course I'd lose the number but who cares lol.
  • 5 out of 6 connections dropped. One of the agents admitted it's most likely their co-workers hanging up on me because I'm a pre-paid customer and pre-paid customers aren't supposed to get help except for that hotline. (the one that DOESN'T work)
  • Sure this isn't their support hotline, but also their support hotline is unreachable. None of these guys were interested about at least getting their hotline fixed.

Long story short:

If you are a Vodafone customer, especially a pre-paid customer, don't bother calling Vodafone. I've seen my fair share of useless CS agents in my life, I've never seen this kind of hostile, asshole-by-profession ones anywhere.

Instead, here comes the hot tip: check your MeinVodafone app today, regardless of if you have an issue with it or not, select "Mein Vertrag", "Mobiles Bezahlen" and then disable the shit out of that fucker.

Doesn't matter if you have never enabled it. It somehow defaults to enabled. If someone charges you with it, you can't do anything.

I've left the best hot tip for the last: If you can help it, use anything but Vodafone. Next month I'll switch to Deutsche Telekom. IDK if it's any better, but at least they seem to have one hotline number for everyone.

I mean, can it be any worse?