Taking Customer Service to an All Time Low - The Worst Experience Ever - TRY GETTING A VAT INVOICE

[Styles245]

I am really hoping someone here can help, O2 clearly can't and this might get a little Ranty, so I will apologise in advance. 

On Monday 4th March I was completing some work (old) expenses which included paying for my mobile bill. To my shock, the system had changed and the new bills include VAT but with no breakdown. I make a call to O2 thinking this should be easily resolved......how wrong was I? I was told the bill would take 24 hours to generate and would be emailed to me. It should be noted it took 55 minutes on the phone and a phone call back from a manager to actually get to that point.

So I found a spare hour of my life on Tuesday 5th March I called the 202 telephone number due to the invoices not showing the VAT. I was informed that I should be able to see the VAT on MY02 within 24 hours and that the time would be up at 12:15 and the operator would call me back at 13:00 to ensure that I could access the information. At 13:00 the situation was exactly the same and I had received no phone call. I therefore made a call at 13:14 to try and resolve the issue. Eventually, I managed to speak to a manager (who I was disconnected from when transferring, but they did call me back) who after 43 minutes and me now being late to a meeting, told me that actually everything I had been told appeared not to have been actioned, and that VAT invoices can only be sent by post! Which will take 14 days.

At this point I wrote a formal email complaint to complaintreviewservice@o2.com (which has still not been actioned) Acknowledged they have received it and hope to resolve the issue in 7 working days and will be in contact. I have had more contact with tumbleweed since then.

On 26th March I called again as the 14 days had passed and still not received a single bill in the post. To be told that they would have to reaction the request and this would take another 5 days. 

Today I have called again to be told exactly the same as the 26th March.

Does anyone have any idea how I can get VAT bills for previous months? I have managed to get them to change to a VAT going forward, but no one seems capable of generating a VAT from October 2023 to February 2024. Any thoughts or ways forward would be much appreciated!

[Enlli]

Yep, things have changed and VAT is no longer shown on consumer accounts.

Technically it should be easy but I'm not sure about previous bills, I suspect they will have to be raised manually.

As you have filled an officialcomplaint it is unlikely customer services will now help until that is resolved

Present turn round on complaints appears to be around 8 weeks going by what we see and hear on this community 

[Styles245]

8 Weeks is fine if you are told 8 weeks......8 weeks also happens to be the ombudsman period. Is that a coincidence? Customer services is saying complaints are taking 10 working days, its about setting expectation levels. 

Customer service is fine dealing with the issue, provided I am prepared to wait another 5 days. Although I am still to be convinced that they will even do anything. 

[pgn]

Reach out to O2 via Social Media, link just below this post has the ways, @Styles245  - it can take 3 or 4 days for them to engage, but you can keep poking them every so often to keep your issue up on their list of contacts.  Then you may be able to get bills in the standard, recognised VAT format (as shown here in the older version of MyO2 Guide: How do I get to the 'Download Bill' page?) sent out by e-mail as PDF or via paper mail (may be a postal charge for paper). I have used it, it works.

Meantime in your Web MyO2 (not App!) you will see, under billing history:

That line highlighted tells you to contact them if you want VAT bills enabled from that point on (it used to not be retrospective on the legacy system, perhaps the new is different?)

That said, since I was moved from Legacy to new 360 billing, I have none of my old bills visible prior to last October, when I was moved to the new billing system. Erk! Thankfully no need for VAT invoices here any more 😎

Your mileage may vary, @Styles245. And with a complaint filed, despite the cited official 10-day (really 8 week!) delay, you may find all O2 Support contacts drop you like a hot potato. It has been getting worse since O2 and VM merged operations. So it goes.