Hackery

Soul Communications FAIL!

Wed 04 Mar 2009

What's a blog if not a vehicle for an occasional rant?

I used to have a mobile with Soul Communications, and recently changed to another provider because Soul cancelled the plan I'd been on with them for 3 or 4 years. I ported my number, and gathered that that would close the Soul account, and all would be good. Soul has a credit card on that account that they've billed for the last 3 years or so without problems. I've had nothing from them to indicate there are any issues.

And so today I get a Notice of Demand and Disconnection from Soul advising me that my account is overdue, charging me additional debt recovery fees, and advising that if I don't pay all outstanding amounts immediately it'll be referred to debt collectors.

Nice work Soul.

So let's recap. I've had no notices that my account is overdue, no contact from anyone from Soul, no indication that there are any issues, and then a Notice of Demand?

I go and check my email, in case I've missed something. Two emails from Soul since the beginning of the year, the most recent from a week ago. They're HTML-only, of course, and I use a text email client, but hey, I'll go the extra mile and fire up an HTML email client to workaround the fact that multipart/alternative is a bit too hard.

The emails just say, "Your Soul Bill is Now Available", and point to the "MySoul Customer Portal". (Yes, it would be nice if it was a link to the actual bill, of course, rather than expecting me to navigate through their crappy navigation system, but that's clearly a bit too sophisticated as well; but I digress.) There's no indication in any of the emails that anything is amiss, like a "Your account is overdue" message or something. So no particular reason I would have bothered to go and actually login to their portal, find my bill, and review it, right? They've got the credit card, right?

So let's go and check the bill. Go to "MySoul Salvation Portal", or whatever it's called, dig out obscure customer number and sekrit password, and login. Except I can't. "This account is inactive."

Aaaargh!

So let's recap:

account has been cancelled due to move to another carrier (yippee!)
can't login to super-customer-portal to get bills
emails from Soul do not indicate there are any problems with the account
no other emails from the Soul saying "we have a problem"
maybe they could, like, phone my mobile, since they do have the number - no, too hard!

Epic mega stupendous FAIL! What a bunch of lusers.

So now I've phoned Soul, had a rant, and been promised that they'll email me the outstanding accounts. That was half an hour ago, and nothing in the inbox yet. I get the feeling they don't really want to be paid.

And I feel so much better now. :-)