It happened again. 

When I woke up Monday morning my LTE connection was down. I checked – rebooted the router a few times without success other than at one point in time the router completely stopped responding and decided to not even try to boot anymore. I had to go on a quick business trip so I let my wife know she’ll not have internet at least until I return and hit the road.

From the car I called up @Vodafone help line and got connected quite fast. Nice lady talking to me; I explained the situation and also mentioned that I had complained about the router quite a few times already but did not even get an offer to replace. While we chatted she found out that the LTE base station covering my area was dead anyway, so I’d have to wait anyway. I agreed, came back to the router topic and she literally said:

“I can’t just decide to exchange the router, but I have access to it, will do some tests and then decide on proceedings”.

I mentioned I could not imagine her having access to a router that’s a) not booting and b) can’t connect as the LTE base station is down, but she was really sure she knows her business. She promised to keep me informed shortly and we hang up.

As expected I never heard back from her.

Tuesday evening (my wife kept nagging about not having internet at home) on my way home I called up @Vodafone again. Another nice lady (and this time I really mean it). I explained the situation again, she looked up the history, told me she could not understand why her colleague did not keep me informed, promised a fast exchange of the router (she even called back about 10 min later to confirm the new router was on its way), directly did a call routing from our home number to my cell,  gave us a nice data volume on my wife’s mobile to use as mobile hotspot until the new router arrives and was in general helpful, pleasant and knew her stuff.

Needless to say the new router arrived Thursday and I was back online after of course doing my in-house adjustments.

So @Vodafone: Thanks for getting better in support – I suggest you do a new survey on customer satisfaction, have the names of the service staff in the survey and start appropriate actions after receiving the rating.

Cheers/Chris