Poor old Vodaphone is officially a customer services disaster, with Ofcom fining them £4.6m for "serious and sustained breaches of consumer protection rules".
Vodafone also failed to act quickly enough to identify or address these problems, which stemmed from the company transferring to a new billing system.3 Only after Ofcom intervened did the company take effective steps to stop pay-as-you-go customers from paying money for nothing, and to reimburse those affected.
Vodafone also breached Ofcom’s billing rules, because the top-ups that consumers had bought in good faith were not reflected in their credit balances.
In a second investigation, we found that Vodafone failed to comply with our rules on handling customer complaints.
Vodafone’s customer service agents were not given sufficiently clear guidance on what constituted a complaint, while its processes were insufficient to ensure that all complaints were appropriately escalated or dealt with in a fair, timely manner.
Vodafone fined £4.6 million for failing customers - Ofcom
According to the beeb, Vodaphone claim a lot of problems were related to a new IT system. Ahh we've heard that old chestnut used a few times 
So customer service still very much high on peoples agenda, and to be honest, it's not that really hard to implement. With multitudes of review sites, social media and the odd business forum, there are plenty of avenues for disgruntled customers to vent their dissatisfaction in realtime and for posterity.
So why do so many companies still get it so wrong? If you have a problem, all you want to do is speak to someone, or directed to someone who can deal with your issue fairly quickly, and who can outline and set your expectations.
ie "not a problem, we have all the information we need, let me look into it, and I will be in touch within xyz days". Is it really that hard? Or is it a scalability issue? Big organisations are incapable of instilling a standard customer service ethos across large teams?
For a small business there is no excuse, customer service can make or break you.
For larger businesses there is an opportunity. Surprise us with your professionalism and customer service experience, regardless how bad you used to be, or how bad we think you are 
