The Guild publicly exposes what it considers bad practise by mobile phone companies.
Most Vodaphone contract customers are aware they can upgrade their mobile phones every year. These upgrades might be free or a small charge may be levied depending on the phone.
In our investigation, following complaints from members, we tried to upgrade a phone to the relatively new Samsung P510. According to the Vodaphone representative we spoke to, a NEW Vodaphone customer can purchase this phone for £20 when taking out a new 12 month contract. We have 3 contract phones with Vodaphone and despite the fact we have to renew our contract every 12 months, we were quoted nearly £200 to purchase this same phone!
We put it to Vodaphone that they were not really interested in existing customers as this was an extortionate amount to pay for an 'upgrade' by a long standind existing customer of theirs when they are prepared to offer this phone to NEW customers for £20.
Vodaphone argued that, the upgrade price reflects the 'use' of the existing customers account - i.e the more you pay them for phone call charges etc, the cheaper the 'upgrade' phone would be. We counter argued that, as a NEW customer, they would have no idea of the spending habits of that customer so their argument was flawed.
Vodaphone then agreed with us that it was purely a marketing excercise to win over more customers at the expense of exisitng customers - especially when we pointed out we could actually cancel one of our existing contract agreements, then take out a new agreement, with a new telephone number and purchase the phone for £20. Thus we could purchased the phone for £20, were not a NEW customer but were classed as a NEW customer because a new telephone number would be issued bumping up their 'new customer' figures.
We eventually got the price of the phone down to £15 after telephoning their Customer Support department and threatening to move our accounts to another provider and inform OFTEL and Trading Standards.
Don't let mobile phone companies hold you over a barrel!