Lyca Mobile UK
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Plan renewal debacle. Customer Services non-existent. Senior Managers not interested in helping.
** Update 3 - I have now moved to another provider due to the poor customer service I received at every level at LYCA over the issues highlighted below. The customer service so far with the new provider has been refreshingly excellent. It is a shame that LYCA were so disinterested about helping a previously loyal customer! ** Original Post: My wife and I have been customers with LYCA for over 16 months, USWCH15GB and USWCH6GB monthly plans. Unfortunately, my credit card recently needed to be changed due to fraudulent use. The new card details were submitted to our online accounts before the above plans expired. Nevertheless, the plans did not get renewed and we were both moved onto Pay As You Go tariffs, despite many efforts on our part to manually renew the plans. The LYCA website clearly states, “Remember, there is typically a grace period after your plan expires, during which you can still renew your plan and reactivate your services.” The manual renewal of our plans proved to be totally impossible as: 1) Our online accounts were unable to access our ‘present plan’ details for a number of days before and after the renewal deadline. 2) It appears impossible to contact a human being via dialling 322 (we tried numerous number options once through to the call directing system). 3) Contact via ‘LIA’ keeps timing out ‘due to inactivity’ even when you’ve got through to an actual ‘Customer Service Agent’ (or is it just another AI Bot) and have supplied a good deal of info.. We tried starting again but LIA kept timing out waiting for an agent to respond! 4) Email contact seems to disappear into a black hole or takes so long to get a response that it’s far too late. The only response we eventually got just told us to do all the things that we had already stated had been grossly unsuccessful. Emails to senior managers have, so far, not even been acknowledged. This has to be the worst customer service we have ever experienced! We are now in discussions with other mobile providers to see what they can offer us. The customer service responses from these have been a refreshing change from LYCA Mobile, but then again LYCA have set such a low bar. If LYCA wish to actually make contact with us and renew our long held monthly plans then we may be willing to give them a second chance, but at the moment it will be a goodbye from us. **UPDATE** It is amazing that within minutes of my review being published LYCA responded. It is a shame I haven't had that commitment from them via the normal channels! In their response LYCA state, "Had we been contacted prior to the bundle’s expiry, we could have assisted by updating the payment method in time to allow a successful renewal." My review clearly highlights the efforts we went to to try and contact LYCA before the plans expired. This proved to be impossible and extremely frustrating. To just brush this off in this way adds insult to injury. It may be useful to discuss this further with LYCA but, as we have found to our cost, LYCA are extremely difficult to contact and get a meaningful response from them without going via a public TrustPilot review. **UPDATE 2** LYCA stated in their response below: “Please note that updating the payment information on your Lyca Mobile account does not automatically update the payment method linked to the auto-renewal of your bundle.” After we were forced off of our long term bundles and onto PAYG, we both received (presume auto sent) offers for a free 5Gig Data 100texts/mins package that lasted 5 days. We took this as this would at least give us some continued service while we were trying to sort out the renewal of our previous packages. After 5 days these free packages have auto renewed to 30 day plans, without us doing anything further. This shows that my new credit card had successfully registered as the payment method for our accounts and disproves the above statement made by LYCA. My credit card was available as a payment method for the previous plans. We have still not had any further contact from LYCA, despite several emails, so we can only presume that they are happy to see us leave. ***Again - If LYCA do want to keep us as customers then they do have our contact details (we find it extremely difficult to contact them). However, they better be quick as we are ready to place orders with another mobile provider***