Oook!

Let's see how the story continues. Today I sent another email to the O2 support: "You can call me now, I am back in Germany."

Oh and there was no reaction to my four pages long faxed complaint either.

Yes, I do realize that I am making a big fuss about this, but no worries, it does not take up too much time or energy.

After O2s last reply - which was still ridiculous in my opinion, I took a little while to compile the events together and faxed the result to them. All in all four pages and I think so far it is the longest complaint I ever wrote. And since I am still here in Taiwan, I am still friendly. If this yields no results, I can still escalate the situation once I am back in Germany.

And to archive it for the future as well as having a summary in Germany, you can find my complaint when clicking on the following link:

I think I am either getting some real headaches from O2 Germany or maybe I should simply quit my contract with them. In their latest message that they sent to me, I found one sentence that really made me wonder about their core work.

"Wir können Sie nicht in Taiwan anrufen."
We cannot call you in Taiwan.

So there we have one company which business is to sell you communication services. And yes, they probably outsourced their customer service to a call-center. A CALL-center, which should be very good at calling people.

I am really having some serious doubts in their abilities to provide good service and in their abilities to find good excuses to avoid direct customer contact.

I got another reaction to my complaint. I was notified my email that they delivered the bills to me. But no word about my other complains. No call back as I wanted to.

Maybe they hope by fulfilling one of my requests that I will be happy enough to forget about the rest.

This does not seem as if they are interested in retaining me as a customer.

After I got three bills earlier today for Mai, June and July, I also received the bill for August. And since I did not use my O2 sim card during that time, it helped a little to understand the bill structure, but added confusion somewhere else.

First of all, I have contract where I am not required to pay a monthly basic fee. Apparently they still charge a fee but credit the same amount on one bill. I suppose this is for bookkeeping purposes. Also I do get a student discount off 15%.

So, on my last bill for August:

Monthly fixed costs before tax:
- Genion S: 0.0084 Euro
- O2 Genion: 8.3949 Euro
(I still need to find out why there are actually two contracts listed).

Credits and discounts before tax:
- 15% discount: -1.2605 Euro
- Credit O2 Genion: -7.1428

So what happened here?

Discount = (0.0084+8.3949)*15% = 1.2605
Discount + 7.1428 = 8.4033 < 8.3949 + 0.0084

So basically first the discount of fee that I actually do not need to pay is deducted and then I receive credit for the remainder of the fee that I do not have to pay.

Confusing. But in all the bills, the remainder is constant at 7.14 Euro, which means in return that on all bills the discount on the monthly fee is 1.26 Euro. Let's remember that for now.

My bill from July:

Monthly fixed costs before tax:
- O2 Genion: 8.3949 Euro
- Genion S: 0.0084 Euro

Credits and discounts before tax:
- 15% discount: -4.9598 Euro
- Credit O2 Genion: -7.1428 Euro
- Connections / Talks: 28.3676 Euro

So my discount should be 1.26 + (28.3676 * 15%) = 5.5151 Euro. But my bill says only 4.9598 Euro. How can this be?

The solution is a always in the fineprint. The 15% discount does not apply for calls to hotline which charge special rates, just like the hotline of my bank. After deducting the money of that one call from 28.3676, the calculation fits.

Yes... it is complicated. No wonder there a special department in the call center that deals with inquiries about bills...

I have been with my phone provider O2-Germany for many years and usually I have been quite happy with them. So happy that I even referred a lot of exchange students and other friends that I was mentoring to them. Usually all my worries were easily taken care of by the service hotline.

Then one day however, they stopped sending me bills. The last bill that I got was for the month of April. Since then nothing. Of course it is obvious that I still have to pay and I wanted to pay. I did not want to accumulate more and more fees month after month. So I called the hotline to inquire about this issue. Their response was that there are some technical errors with the billing systems, but I could expect my bill within the next weeks.

A month later, I called again because I still did not get any bill. I was explaining my situation to them, that I will be going to Taiwan in about two months and that during that time, I will not be able to pay the bill as I have no income that is being credited to my German bank account. But sadly, there was nothing the O2-hotline could do. Only once the bill has been issued, it would be possible to discuss payment options. Also I was informed that apparently the billing department had to create the bills now manually for the affected customers and that I would be put onto a priority list. So I should expect my bills within the next two weeks.

Yeah right. No bill no nothing. The last time I called them to inquire about the situation, I got no news, but wanted to withdraw my permission for them to take out the money from my account. To bad that this can only be done in writing. Of course it is possible to use the webinterface to allow them to take out money from your account or to change bank account details. But there is no option of deleting your account details nor to withdraw that permission. And I expect that randomly changing your account details to something nonexistent would result in other trouble.

Of course being rather busy, I forgot to cancel my permission that allows them to take out the money from my account.

So now I am in Taiwan for a month already. I still have no new bill that I can see through the webinterface and if they mailed anything to me, it is of course in Germany.

But today I see in my bank account that O2 has withdrawn a good amount of money. Not happy about this.

Really not happy.

Going to mail the customer service now. I expect them to call me here in Taiwan to resolve this situation. Really curious how this will turn out.

It can be quite troublesome to pay bills. Especially if you want to pay them, but the company cannot tell you how much you owe them. My phone service provider O2 seems to have such a problem. I have not received any bills for the last two months. After several calls to the hotline and being transferred from department to department, they seem to have/had some technical error and are now working on this issue as well as catching up with sending out the bills. No one has been able to explain the issue to me nor been able to tell me when I can expect my bill. And I would really hate to pay a bill for 3 months (or more) while I am in Taiwan and have no income on my German account.

So of course I call the hotline and try to settle it in advance or to find an alternative solution. The billing department seemed to be especially inflexible and unwilling to negotiate anything. No can do and have to wait till the bill is ready and it is my problem if I am abroad for three months. At least then I got transferred back to the customer service and the lady there was a more helpful. I was not the first customer who called about the problem. After she made some internal calls, it seems that I am ranking higher in priority now and should be expecting my bill before I fly off. If I haven't gotten anything in the next two weeks, I should call again. Not too sure, but maybe this is just a stalling technique... oh well, wait and see.