Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I'll begin my long tale of O2 woes.
I'd been on O2 Pay and Go, paying £10 per month for aeons, getting unlimited texts, 150 minutes, and 500mg data and I very rarely need to go over the £10 min top up.
I had to call customer services at the end of March about a problem I was having (but I can't now remember what the problem was) and they persuaded me to change to Pay Monthly for £5pm to get unlimited texts, 500 minutes, and 1gb of data, but have to pay by direct debit.
Got my new SIM on 3 April, successfully swapped it over, retained my old number and got confirmation of the direct debit being set up.
Toward the end of April I got a text reminding me that I needed to top up to ensure I had a minimum £10 credit. When I checked my bank account I found that there was no direct debit in place. When I logged in to my O2 account, the home page showed my number as Pay Monthly, but when I went further into the account it still showed as being Pay and Go an with less than £10 in credit). When I checked my account on the O2 app on my phone it also showed why account as being Pay Monthly, but couldn't show me my monthly allowances.
I tried to call O2 customer service to query this. The number for customer services for Pay Monthly customers is 202, but I just got an unobtainable tone when I dialled it. But I was able to get through on the Pay and Go number, 4445. They said I was still on Pay and Go. I explained that I had a new SIM and had had confirmation of the new Direct Debit. They delved deeper and agreed that I should have been changed over to Pay Monthly but for some reason the change over hadn't been completed. They promised to resolve this and that the change over should be complete within 24 hours, but in the meantime I needed to top-up manually or my credit would run out. I paid a tenner, as that's the minimum it would accept, and thought no more about it.
Toward the end of May I got a text message warning me that I needed to top up before the 27th to ensure I had the minimum of £10 credit. I'd also discovered that I couldn't send text messages, only receive them. When I checked on-line and on the O2 app, nothing had changed, I still appeared to be both on Monthly Pay AND Pay and Go. When I'd called customer services in April line was so bad and the Asian operator's English was so poor it had taken me ages to explain my problem and to understand what he was saying to me. This time I used the chat option on the O2 app. They said they'd look into it again, and gave me instructions on how to possibly solve the problem sending texts and asked me to inform them if they fixed the text problem. When I got back to them to tell them that I'd tried all their suggestions, but I still couldn't send texts, I got an auto message that they were very busy and couldn't respond right now and I should try later. I gave up for the day as I'd spent ages on the app without getting a fix for either of my problems.
Same thing happened at the end of June, except I called customer services rather than use chat on the O2 app, but once again, could only get through on the Pay and Go customer service number. This time I got a South African operator and a reasonably good line, but had to go through the whole scenario again. Once again they said the account should be fully changed over to Monthly Pay within 24 hours and they’d look into the text problem, but in order not to run out of credit I had to top up manually again.
After 48 hours, nothing had changed so I completed an on-line complaint form.
I had a look on the O2 forum to see if anyone else had reported a similar problem sending texts and one of the suggestions was to check that I had the correct number for the Pay Monthly message hub in my phone settings. This was one of the suggestions I’d had in the on-line chat in May. I’d checked it at the time, but checked it again and it was the correct number. But then I had a flash of inspiration and wondered if I could send texts if I change the hub number to the one for Pay and Go. Bingo!! I can now send texts.
A couple of days after sending in the complaint I got a notification from my bank that a new Direct Debit had been set up for O2, so I was hoping that this meant they’d finally fixed everything. No such luck. The home page on-line still shows my number as Pay Monthly, but the allowances page still shows it as Pay and Go. The only change is that the payment date has changed from the 27th of the month, which was the Pay and Go date, to the 3rd of the month, which was the new Pay Monthly payment date. And the O2 app still shows an error when trying to show my allowances.
Fuck knows if they’ll ever get this fixed.