Bob Telekom: How not to handle a billing mistake - a disaster story

Apologies for the forever without updates; maybe I'll start this up again someday. For now, here's a customer service nightmare from our cell phone provider that I'm hoping will show up on google searches for Bob Telekom in Austria.

I've been a Bob customer for about 1 year now. They screwed up my request to keep my old phone numbers (AND my wife's request, actually), their pay-for-service policy is kind of irritating, I've noticed some billing glitches whereby I was charged €12 or so over the summer when I should have been charged €0, but overall, I was getting decent phone service for a good price.

Three weeks ago, I called Bob at their €1,09/minute service line to request data service for myself and my wife. The service representative seemed more or less fine, and the call was over in 3 minutes or so. I enabled data on both of our phones, and October began swimmingly.

Two weeks ago, my wife gets an SMS: "Warning! Your Bob bill is €91!" My wife calls me, panicked. She made a call or two in Germany, but nothing longer than a minute or two. I look up her account online and see the €91 bill and I don't see data service enabled on that phone. I call bob service and explain the situation, and my concern that perhaps data wasn't in fact enabled on her phone when I requested it to be. The service representative told me that he could see nothing of the sort on his side, and that sometimes these glitches happen but they fix themselves rapidly and I probably won't even see it on my bill at the end of the month. If I do, I can just call and those costs will be removed immediately. I asked about the data service and he said that it was enabled and it must be a glitch on the website that's telling me it's not.

The following day, my wife gets an SMS: "Warning! Your bob bill is €162!" I call bob service immediately. The lady there explains that she's being charged €150 for data usage and there's no data service on the phone. She enables data service so that the phone won't keep accruing costs and suggests I send bob a letter asap about the situation.

An hour later, my wife gets an SMS: "Your bob bill is now €164 and we are locking your phone for security reasons". She can no longer text or call out. Two WEEKS later, I have called nearly every day and been told nearly 5 times that a manager would get in touch with me to discuss the situation (2 weeks, no manager). The bill is now €0, but the phone is still locked. I have been told that the phone would start working in: 'A week ago', 'A few hours', and 'A month or so'. I finally told them to send me a NÜV Bestätigung so I can change to a new phone provider (BTW, Drei has some EXCELLENT offers going on right now!), and was told that I can't get one because her phone is locked. When I explained that her phone being locked for the last 2 weeks was the whole reason I'm switching providers, the lady asked if I couldn't just wait 3-4 weeks longer for the phone to get unlocked so I could switch without losing my old phone number. When I asked for the costs of this more or less useless service call to be refunded, she said that I've been calling the bob service line too many times in the past few weeks and that she wouldn't be willing to refund that call. Maybe I could discuss that with the manager that would (ha!) call me.

We're switching to Drei today. They're offering slightly better prices than bob, they have stores where you can talk to customer service representatives without paying €1,09/minute, and where ridiculous customer service disasters like this one surely couldn't possibly be this bad. Also you can use your phone in Italy, Great Britain and a few other countries as if it were a local phone (no roaming fees). Wish us luck.