O2 student £30 cashback - where is it?

Was a bit of a “legacy” way to do a promo in the first place… But at least it’s getting sorted :slight_smile:

Hi all,

Hernan at first offered to credit my account with £30 on the condition that they could return it if/when o2 pays up. I declined his offer because I am not in urgent need of the money, and I’d rather wait for o2 to sort themselves out.

It seems they’ve given up on o2 entirely though as I’ve had another message from Hernan to say they didn’t want to keep me waiting any longer and so Monzo have credited me £30 which they will then chase up with o2 for themselves.

I feel a bit like I’ve just been handed a resolution when the problem hasn’t really been resolved. I’m still unhappy with o2 as they’ve broken their own terms and conditions to what they offered me, but still no one at o2 will take ownership of the deal.

@crowemanclocks That is very generous of you to offer, thankyou, but really we are alright for cash now that our local council has payed what they owe. I’m not really getting stressed over this anymore so please don’t picture me pulling my hairs out over turkey dinner! I feel like I should chase it up just out of principal, but it’s o2 that I want to pay up and not anyone else. Sadly the only progress I seem to be able to make on that front is through a Monzo agent, and I’ve just been effectively silenced on that front too!

A little frustrating how powerless I feel at the end of it, but I suppose there’s nothing else I can do now.

Thanks for the £30 Monzo, I do hope you tear o2 a new one for me.

4 Likes

That really sucks but generally nothing in life is free so I wouldn’t be surprised if O2 are intentionally making it difficult so that in 90% of cases they don’t have to pay?

2 Likes

Ooof, if this is correct, what a mean, legacy way of treating a customer.

3 Likes

o2 as they’ve broken their own terms and conditions

A company of scammers with appalling customer “service” not sticking to their part of the bargain… I am SOOO surprised. :joy:

Kind of breaks my heart to see Monzo associated in any way with this disaster but I hope it serves as a lesson to everyone (both to Monzo for future partnerships and anyone contemplating to be an O2 customer).

1 Like

I work a lot with O2 and I would say that they genuinely do want the best for their customers. There’s a strong ‘customers first’ ethos within the company which usually shows through in their actions.

Unfortunately it’s hard to get these things right every time and some of the contact centres are run by a third party who isn’t always able to provide the right quality of people with the right level of training.

2 Likes

some of the contact centres

Is it only some? From experience as a customer as well as employee I haven’t had a single instance where I called up support and the entity that picked up wasn’t a complete monkey.

It’s easy to say that you want the best for your customers but what they really need to do is to actually invest in that - build their own UK-based call center, hire humans (and not monkeys) and train them well, and give them efficient tools they need to do their job. The above wouldn’t have happened had systems been updated to support the cash back (it should’ve been handled automatically with no manual intervention at all) and customer service employees been made aware of the offer.

I myself used to work on behalf of O2 in one of the third party contact centres ran by Capita Customer Management, who ironically seem to fail to manage their customers on a regular basis - or at least it was the case when I was there. I can say from experience that the people on the phones are treated so poorly by the Capita management (in the contact centre I worked at) that life is completely sapped out of them - leading many to not care about the job enough to provide the right level of service, not that this excuses the service as it is still unacceptable.

Also the communication in the place is dreadful which makes it more understandable - but unjust - as to why no one was aware of the partnership. The managers I had were rarely generous enough to authorise the customer service advisors to award goodwill gestures for the company’s errors which is pathetic considering it doesn’t come out of their payslip.

@anon23935806 be careful insulting O2 advisers or anyone else for that matter since you never know where people in the monzo community work. I absolutely hated the job thanks the management in the contact centre I worked at but I did have some quality colleagues who, like me, genuinely wanted to help but circumstances prevented it.

I still can’t understand why those people should be trained by Capita to begin with - those people would be doing customer service for O2, so O2 should be the only entity qualified to train them.

I absolutely hated the job thanks the management in the contact centre I worked at but I did have some quality colleagues who, like me, genuinely wanted to help but circumstances prevented it.

Same as me, colleagues in-store (including the store manager) were wonderful but sadly anything up above that level was just a cesspool, so overall my opinion of the company is extremely negative. I wish they would just go out of business and leave space for a company that actually knows what they’re doing.

Agree :100: or at least they should just stop outsourcing to Capita!

Honestly, this is something I find good about legacy banks and am glad Monzo is doing also. Isn’t it better for the consumer that the money they’re short is offered up front and the bank takes on the hassle of resolving the issue?

2 Likes

Anything involving Capita is a bad idea by definition, but in this case, why the F would you outsource it to begin with? It’s literally the only area where they can make a difference, as mobile networks are on the same (quite bad) level of functionality, so good customer service is literally the only reason to stick with one.

They’ve already outsourced the core part of their business to Ericsson/Huawei/Alcatel or some other manufacturer of legacy “magic boxes” (you’d think that a mobile network would try to innovate and be proud of their in-house tech, right? Those guys just buy crappy off-the-shelf stuff and hope it works), and now they’re outsourcing CS as well? I’d love to see if there’s anything that’s not outsourced. :joy:

To be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if they outsourced their stores but kept the O2 logo. And Capita’s business somehow continues to grow despite their high labour turnover :thinking:. Having said that they eventually fell out of the FTSE 100.

Truer words we’re never spoken :joy:

Outsourced stores exist - I was working at one, of which the owner company had the brand of yet another awful broadband provider (with customer service even worse than O2), creating the worst cesspool you could ever have thought of. :joy:

1 Like

What I meant was, it seemed that the thirty quid was firstly offered as a refund on the condition that it would be claimed back by Monzo should O2 make the same recourse. If I read the post correctly it seemed a particularly miserly condition made not of goodwill and in the interests of delighting the customer, but one which simply completed a contractual obligation.

I would hope, for the sake of thirty quid, the time taken by the customer to hold both O2 and Monzo to account (they both, after all, benefit from the promotion) and now for PR’s sake, any money refunded would be allowed to be kept.

2 Likes

Except customer service isn’t the only way mobile networks differentiate, is it? My friends have to be with Vodafone because where they live, in the middle of the Exmoor National Park, the one bar of signal they get when away from the home wifi is better than all of the other mobile networks. No one can compete on price or customer service because of this coverage situation. I would suggest a lot of people are coverage-captives, yet happily stay with their provider because they don’t have to call customer services regularly enough for it to make much of a difference anyway. A bit like legacy banking.

3 Likes

My understanding was that if O2 eventually paid up, the credit from Monzo would be taken back - which is more than fair.

Hello again everyone! I was just browsing some threads on here and thought I’d best come back with a conclusion to this.

On Tuesday 19th December, I was given £30 from Monzo as the o2 money was still missing.

On Thursday 21st December, the money from o2 finally arrived in my account. I don’t know if my transactions the day prior to this triggered these or something, but I eventually got it anyway.

Monzo didn’t ask for this money back - instead I had an email from @KimP on Thursday December 28th to say she had picked up the conversations I’d had as a complaint, and credited my account with an additional £15 as an apology for the delay, hoping that this satisfies my complaint.

It all got resolved in the end, I’m happy with the end result and with the staff and community here at Monzo.

I’d also like to chime in as people in this thread seem to have mixed opinions of o2. My personal experiences with o2 have been great, I’m happy with them as my mobile carrier. This has been my first negative experience with o2 and yes, it was a complete shambles, it’s clear the offer was alien to anyone I was able to speak to but this is not a fault of the agents themselves, instead the management are to blame.

Other than this one negative experience, however, everything has been great with them. I get better coverage than my previous provider, and I like the way the bills are broken down. For my contract, I have seperate bills for my tariff and for my device, which means I can easily pay some of the device plan off early, reducing my monthly payments, or clear it altogether leaving just the tariff.

As a student, I like to credit my accounts with people like o2 so that I don’t have money coming out each month and instead can pay each term. I’m unable to do this for my device plan but I can easily do this for my tariff online without having to speak to customer services.

I know I can likely do similar things with other carriers, but I felt o2 was more transparent and accessible than their competitors in this regard, certainly from my own experiences.

I’m not saying they are the best, and yes they are still a relatively faceles corporation, but I’m happy with my choice. And if it wasn’t for o2, despite their big hiccup, I wouldn’t be with Monzo now!

I’m now using my Monzo account to store funds I will need for larger purchases mid-term, and for my phone’s device plan. This really helps me as I don’t need to worry about leaving any certain amount in my legacy bank.

So I’m likely not using my Monzo account in the same manner as most people, but I’m happy to have it. I’d probably benefit more with a seperate legacy bank instead where I can accrue interest, but I’m not the type of person to save money (I don’t need to spend less - just to earn more!) so I’m not that phased.

Bit of a ramble there and probably digging this thread up from the grave a bit now sorry, but I felt the need to come back and conclude this thread instead of leaving the cliffhanger there for anyone to guess what happened next. Thanks all.

9 Likes

Thanks for the update. Glad it all came good in the end. I think with banks and mobile phone networks, you’ll always meet people who think Company X is awful, whilst someone else thinks they’re excellent. How companies respond positively and definitively to complex service problems such as this one, however, can actually build trust and rapport with customers.

2 Likes

I’m glad it worked out so well for you! Monzo was super generous too.

All that said, how has O2 been in high density environments? They’re consistently ranked by most independent testers as by far the worst network in Britain, and their relatively weak spectrum position definitely doesn’t put them off to a great technical start, but how is it really when you get 50,000 people or so in one place? In my experience, Vodafone and EE do great and Three falls apart. But I’ve never had O2.