http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-s...wales-13770725

Conduit is the company Vodafone use to handle most of their UK based customer services, if you ever call them up and you get through to someone with a Welsh accent you're probably talking to a Conduit employee.

Vodafone is the company who is not renewing their contract with them - I used to work there, someone of my former colleagues confirmed it's them - so VF customers can soon expect more of that "wonderful" offshore callcentre CS.

A bummer for the workers in wales but we don't know yet if they are going off shore.

And just when Vodafone customers thought this was going to be the start of things getting better (by losing the rude staff at Conduit).

I have not had experience of this rudeness (as im not a vodafone customer) but i know others who have!

TBH thats great news, that lot in wales were bloody awful.

Besides, not convinced they will offshore it, have they not quite recently opened a huge purpose built call centre in the midlands somewhere.

Agreed about the rudeness, Conduit will employ just about anyone - do a Google for "swine flu hotline manned by drunks and druggies", Conduit supplied the staff for that too.

The word doing the rounds there is the jobs are going overseas. I feel sorry for the one or two good workers there but am quietly glad the rude and arrogant ones will be on the High Street jobcentre soon. As usual the customers suffers anyway.

Yeah. It's in Stoke, so expect to be greeted with "how at duck!"

At least I can understand the guys in India.

Joking side, not a good day for the telecoms industry in the UK. And I'll bet my back teeth in less than 5 years I'll be in the same boat, so I'm well prepared.

we cant assume they are going off shore

Why is that when I put on a welsh or Indian accent they sound the same?

Because im guessing your neither welsh nor indian so can do the accents very well.

When i try to mimic any accent i sound irish

Vodafone customer services are rude, don't know what they are doing and are just plain carp!

Conduit UK, who are employed to act on behalf of Vodafone should be ashamed with themselves. With all the call centre jobs going over seas you would think any remaining UK based one's would fight extra hard to provide a good service in order to try and keep the jobs in his country!

I pass the Conduit UK building in Swansea's Orchard Street daily and the amount of young looking chav's standing outside the front door on their breaks puffing away on fags is amazing!

language, Fag butts and chav's everywhere, eww.

Take a look over on Vodafone's forums, almost every post is a complaint about Customer Services, there is even a dedicated team paid to track down unhappy customers who post on the internet to get them the help and support they should have got via customer services and to try and limit damage to their reputation!

Can't blame vodafone for doing this, India can't be any worse than conduit UK and i would never in a billion years ever thought i would rather speak to an indian call centre over a UK based one.

Its sad times for Vodafone. Their business customer services offices near me are in the process of closing - no idea what will happen to those calls.

Vodafone still use HEROtsc for UK customer services.

As I said, Conduit will employ just about anyone. When I worked there one of the guys on my team was a recovering ex-heroin addict who had been clean for just 2 weeks. Kudos to him for trying to turn his life around but they guy was having his withdrawal symptoms while he was on the phone to customers. The team leader was fully aware of this and simply took him off the phones until his shaking and sweats subsided.

One former Conduit employee who took calls for Vodafone murdered his wife so he and his lover could be together - details found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6519131.stm

Obviously I'm not suggesting all Conduit/Vodafone employees are drug addicts or murderers but it goes to show that Conduit only care about bringing call numbers down - decent customer service is a distance second.

3 (IMO) have had the best CS of all of the networks I've dealt with, although T-Mobile (when you got their Welsh call centre) weren't terrible. You get the usual lies and spin but that is endemic of the mobile industry, not based on where the call centre is.

It didn't take them long to admit that 3 had no plans to improve their network in my area any time soon, and cancelled my contract immediately with no issue (the issue was the phone constantly flapping between 2G and 3G due to a marginal 3G signal). A refund of monies owed was organised quickly enough.

The worst for me was Orange (British call centre, possibly Plymouth), who once refused to speak to me because they thought I didn't sound old enough to be me (I have a pretty deep voice, and people who speak to me on the phone think I am a lot older than I am, so I didn't understand that at all).

What do people ring CS for? I have been a mobile customer for over 15 years. In that time, I have probably rang CS a handful of times, most of those would have been for a PA code, or buying a new handset.

Never really need to ring for anything else. Hence never really experienced any bad customer support.

Use their Twitter help thing, it's much better & faster.

Some people quietly rightfully prefer to speak to a human.

Banbury? I left there at the end of March, and the main business centre closes at the end of March.

It's a business only centre, so most of the calls are routing through to Stoke. Their Dealer / Partner centre has moved to Manchester. Their main Customer Services and collections team will be in Stoke and Account Management teams in Newark.

As for Stoke, as far as I'm aware that's mainly business again. With the centre closing in Wales, I've no idea where that is moving too.

Laughable bit here - when the Banbury site was told it was to close, the Director of Customer Services said it wanted "Centres of excellence". At the time, Banbury was known to be out-performing it's colleagues in Stoke and Newark, so laughable at the time. Hmmm. I'm changing my contract to either O2 or Orange at the end of the contract. That's all I'm sying

There's a multitude of reasons you may need to call customer services. Maybe to have an add-on put on your account, to remove a content bar, to query a bill, to change a tariff, the list is endless.

apart from query a bill, the other stuff can be done online.

Not with Vodafone it can't!

Cannot add any addon's with Vodafone to any of the contracts i have, you cannot add or remove a GPRS bar, neither can you add the reverse premium txt's bar all of which you have to call up and request this stuff!

Again neither can you change tariffs even when your contract is up. you can do very little but view your bill with vodafone online!

That is poor. You would have thought you could do that online. I am a vodafone customer, so should have known

To be fair, Conduit staff are usually so deliberately unhelpful you are rarely able to do any if it on the phone either.

As the other poster said no you can't.

In fact other than view a bill or pay it, there's not much else you can do online, so call centres are quite important. I'd usually say it's a good thing, because it keeps people in jobs, but if the jobs are not even staying in Britain they might as well let us do it online, and save us the hassle of dealing with the language barrier every time you call.