Bad experience with mobile provider - need advice!

schqually

I recently decided to transfer from being an O2 PAYG customer to Bill Pay with another provider. I signed up to a contract with the new provider last Friday, got a great phone at a great price and then at the end of the transaction, the staff in the shop offered to transfer my phone numbers from my old phone to the new one.
In doing so, about 80% of my phone numbers were lost, my old phone seemed to have been wiped clear and to top it all off, the back-up that I had relied on previously (my O2 online account) was shut down the second that my account transferred to the new provider.
The staff were very apologetic and offered me 1 free months subscription, but I was aware that it's going to take me a long time and a huge amount of inconvenience to recover all of these numbers and declined.
Any thoughts on whether I have grounds to make a claim through the small claims court for something like this? And if so, how would I put a figure on the compensation that I feel I am due?
Thanks for your help.

P.s. when the staff attempted to transfer my data, they had not said a word to me about any potential risk of data loss.

gigawatt

this has happened to me, just change your phone settings so the phone automatically saves contacts to your sim card not your phone memory, and also do a backup onto the memory card in the phone. once theyre gone theyre gone, but i dont know how far your claim would go in the small claims court as its re data loss. id say your best bet is to write a letter to head office stating youre considering a legal action and drone on and on and on about the inconvienience caused, essential and precious contacts etc are gone blah blah, you might get nore than a month free. maybe contact O2 and be really nice to them and see if they can help retrieve your account details ????

Sponge Bob

gigawatt wrote: »

just change your phone settings so the phone automatically saves contacts to your sim card not your phone memory

Other way round :eek: . If your phone will not store numbers and they are all on your sim then DO NOT CHANGE PROVIDER until the shop does a full backup for you......and prints it out in case of issues pushing it onto the new sim

jimmycrackcorm

I'd double check your old phone with the old sim in it as you'd have to specifically do a delete to remove the phone numbers. It's possible that the contacts list on the old phone may have been toggled to use sim instead of use phone and by switching back they may re-appear. It's worth a try to see....

tommy21

schqually wrote: »

I recently decided to transfer from being an O2 PAYG customer to Bill Pay with another provider. I signed up to a contract with the new provider last Friday, got a great phone at a great price and then at the end of the transaction, the staff in the shop offered to transfer my phone numbers from my old phone to the new one.
In doing so, about 80% of my phone numbers were lost, my old phone seemed to have been wiped clear and to top it all off, the back-up that I had relied on previously (my O2 online account) was shut down the second that my account transferred to the new provider.
The staff were very apologetic and offered me 1 free months subscription, but I was aware that it's going to take me a long time and a huge amount of inconvenience to recover all of these numbers and declined.
Any thoughts on whether I have grounds to make a claim through the small claims court for something like this? And if so, how would I put a figure on the compensation that I feel I am due?
Thanks for your help.

P.s. when the staff attempted to transfer my data, they had not said a word to me about any potential risk of data loss.

Its a pain I know but in fairness you moved from the provider without backing up your info - essentially you no longer use their service - whether the data backup (the service or do you mean just O2 online itself) is actually gone or they just don't want to help an ex-customer I don't know, but its not unreasonable not to have that backup when you are no longer a customer. Would you recognise some of the numbers from previous O2 Bills?

No offense, but you have no grounds for compensation from the small claims court as far as I can see. How do you prove what damage has been done? How do you quantify it? Who do you claim against? How do you deal with the fact that your data disappeared once you moved from O2, pretty much absolving them from any responsability towards you? If your intent on doing this, it might be worth checking if the new company you signed with has a contract like "We will not be held responsable for lost data etc." If that is not there then maybe, but honestly I can't see how it is anything more than a pain to get back the contacts in the eyes of a court. To you or me, it might mean valuable time and contracts lost, but you can't claim for possible earnings.

Just my two cents! Only other thing you could do would be contact a data recovery agency if they mean that much to you. Best of luck with it.

drunkmonkey

jimmycrackdown may be right, your numbers could still be on the old phone but it's set to read sim only hence your numbers not showing up.
Also depending on what new phone you have it may be reading the phone memory only, you may have to go into sim contacts and mark all then copy to phone.

as for the o2 backup I presume they have to keep records of peoples personal data, they will have a back up of it somewhere, are you entitled to get a copy off them?, I'd presume so under data protection laws.

As for taking the shop or assistants to court, not sure how much of a case you'd have, agree they should have warned you of the risks but it happens from time to time by nobodys fault. Old phones don't always do what you want them to do.

Keep a backup this time around if you've a nokia use pc suite or back up online with sites like zyb here http://zyb.com/lang/en/

Tarakiwa

Wow - what a pain!
But, to be honest, I dont see that you would have any grounds for compensation in the small claims court (in fact, my understanding of the small claims court is that they cannot award compensation, but can ONLY award you a refund of your purchase price if the good / service is faulty. I know that if my understanding is wring that I will be corrected here very quickly!!)

Cabaal

Small claims court won't accept a claim for compensation for this type of issue

schqually

Thanks all for your input. Some helpful points - I hadn't been aware that the small claims court doesn't deal with compensatory issues, but it makes sense.

Tommy21 - I think you've missed the point. I have no problem with O2 or the fact that my account with them was closed at the time of transfer. The reason I mentioned it was to illustrate the extreme coincidence that caused me to be unable to retrieve the data. The problem I have is with the new provider and it's staff who lost my data.

Anyway, like I was saying, thanks for your input - I have tried a numer of different things with the phone and the sim since to avail, but it was worth trying. I think it might be time for me to move on from this one - sent out a few large group mails last night, stuck a post up on facebook, etc requesting people to send me their numbers... At least I'll know who my friends are after this! ;-)

Oryx

One last thing. I have a Nokia that 'lost' my numbers when I tried to transfer from phone memory to sim. A crash during the transfer meant that the phone still had the numbers (looking at memory status showed this) but I couldnt access them, all contacts folders showed as empty. Eventually by playing with the memory (reading sim only, or phone only) I got them back. It was a software problem rather than the numbers being gone.

Just saying in case it helps at all.

schqually

Thanks Oryx - I won't give up yet!

foggy_lad

schqually wrote: »

Thanks Oryx - I won't give up yet!

have you tried connecting the phone to a pc using the pc suite software and seeing if the contacts can be recovered that way?