Lebara Mobile (FR)
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Simply AWFUL customer service
Here below is the email that I sent to Lebara in early May 2024. After 2 weeks I received no response, so I rang them. Irfereed to the complaint and the Lebara member of staff assured me that the Complsint Team would get in touch with 48 hours. It is now 3 weeks on and I have heard absolutely nothing. My advice to you is NEVER go with this company. Their customer service is truly awful. Email sent to Lebara Customer Care email address in early May 2024: Dear Complaint Team, You state below that you apologise for all the inconvenience caused. We’ll, let me describe below exactly the impact of that inconvenience. So, as you have accepted responsibility I am requesting that you actually do something about this and recompense me for the substantial disruption to my life that being without a phone service has caused to me. Due to Lebara’s incompetence in not be able to efficiently activate my new SIM card, I was without a useable mobile phone for 10 days. The impact on me was: 1. 10 days of not being able to receive phone calls from my ill relative in North Yorkshire. He relies on ringing me when he is lonely or in an emergency. He said he had tried ringing me (during the period you did not/ could not activate my SIM). He said he could not get through and that my phone wasn’t working. He was distressed about this and now does not trust my phone that he can get through to me in urgent circumstances. This has unnerved him and is added worry on top of a lot of serious medical issues and loneliness that he is currently having to deal with. 2. I had got used to using my phone to pay for things like fuel for my car, so I don’t take my bank cards with me anymore. I couldn’t pay for petrol with my phone one day. I had to waste my time driving back home to get my bank card and drive back to the fuel station and buy fuel. I was running very low on fuel. Not what you want to have to when you’ve had a busy and long day at work. Very frustrating and time consuming. I am sure you will be able to relate to this scenario. 3. I am a treasurer of a badminton club. I need my mobile phone in order to receive text messages of the security code to allow me to make electronic transfers from the club bank account to pay for hall hire etc. This I could not due during the period in question and delayed me making payments , which made me look unprofessional. 4. Frustration at the poor advice from Lebara customer service staff. I received an email that the porting over of my old number from Vodafone and activation of my new SIM would be complete by 23:59 hrs on 26.03.24. On 27.04.24 I rang customer services and was told that I had been misadvised by Lebara previously and that the porting process in fact took 48hrs and not 24hrs. So I patiently waited another 24hrs and still the SIM had not be activated. Then nothing, so I had to ring customer services again. I was told that they had consulted the technical services teams that the problem was DEFINITELY that Vodafone had not unblocked my phone and this why the Lebara SIM was not working. So then I had to go the time and effort to contact Vodafone. Vodafone confirmed in writing that the phone was NOT blocked and could be used successfully with any new SIM. I was furious with Lebara technical services making such a wrong assertion, wasting more of my time and causing me to be without a phone for even longer. I then had to ring Lebara customer services to feedback Vodafone’s report that the phone was not blocked. The Lebara member of staff then said that my phone should work in 24 hours. Finally, about 10 days of the phone not working, it started working. So the big question is: why did it take technical services department so long to remedy the matter? Which was absolutely within their gift/power to remedy. All this caused me immense frustration and distress and a lot of my precious time in having to go backwards and forwards to the customer team on about 4 occasions. Simply terrible service. 5. I have had to use my landline to make calls which I would have done normally on my mobile. As a result, I have incurred £15 of extra charges. I can prove this on my normal bills compared to the bill that I have just received. 6. To collect the information to draft this email and to write it has taken over 45 frustrating minutes of my time, on a Saturday morning when I would far prefer to be relaxing. I then asked Lebara for £60 in compensation in respect of my frustration, the impact of having no functioning phone and being charged £15 by my landline company ( as I had no mobile to make calls with).