For anyone transferring more than 2 sims from a competitor - forget it - it's a nightmare!
Tried to move 3 sims from vodafone to O2 6 days ago. Thus far, all I've managed is 2 - the 3rd one gets rejected and I've been unable to get a definitive answer as to why after speaking to over 10 sales/ customer service reps over 5 hours of calls on 2 separate days 😞
First person I spoke to said O2 had a policy restricting the number of sims that could be ordered in a day (2), and told me to phone back the next day to order the 3rd. Did that and the next person told me the restriction was based on bill payment i.e., had to pay the first bill before anymore sims could be ordered.
Once the first 2 sims arrived and were ported from vodafone, I logged into my account and made an instant payment to clear the bill - waited a day then tried to add the 3rd sim. Still rejected. This time, told it is 'probably' (not definitive) because the account needs to go through a complete bill cycle - so would need to wait a couple of more weeks i.e., outside my cooling off period. Given I've already made a payment, the first 'cycle' may not get recognised as there is nothing to collect - so it 'could' be 6 weeks or so before I can move the final number over - no one can confirm.
The most annoying part of this experience is being passed from one person to another without anyone taking ownership of the issue … and when you do speak to a ‘manager’ the call mysteriously gets ‘dropped’ and no-one calls you back.
Sales just go through the motions (which takes 30 mins to process a new sim) only to find the request is declined. They can’t tell me whether it’s an O2 policy that is declining the app or the credit score search - but it always fails at the credit check phase - even tough I passed the test for the first 2 sims. Double checked my credit score with Experian after this issue and it came back with 960 out of max 999 - so assuming the issue is with O2 policy or a badly programmed system.
Whatever is going on here, sales pass the issue over to customer service … who then say they have to check with sales. Instead of checking/ investigating, my experience thus far has been they simply pass you to the regular sales number and you go back to the regular call waiting queue and have to repeat everything from scratch - 30 mins on hold, then another 30 mins to try and process the application again … which results in another decline and passing you over to customer service so that you can repeat everything again after you guessed it, another 30 mins on hold.
I’m a virgin media customer and thought I’d bring everything under the same umbrella, take advantage of the volt benefits and leverage O2’s policy for free EU roaming and discounted international minutes with their bolt on. The cost saving vs vodafone was minor and only made sense if you spend time in the EU or make lots of international calls - which we do.
On reflection, it’s not worth the hassle. I phoned customer service once more and asked them for PAC numbers so that I could return the numbers back to Vodafone within the 14 day cooling off period with no penalty. That call took another 30 mins and I didn’t even get the PAC numbers - I was told they would be emailed or texted to me and there’d be no penalties or fees to be paid and would get a refund for the payments made thus far. That was almost 2 hours ago now and still no PAC numbers received.
If you are facing similar issues, or simply searching the web to see what such an experience could look like - my advice would be to stay away.
If someone from O2 is reading this, I’d be happy to provide more information and help you figure out how to improve your systems/ policies - I can’t be the first person that has gone through this nightmare, so guessing you are loosing both customers and reputation.
