Roger Binns — Fri 27 July 2012

+T-Mobile have tumbled in customer service and satisfaction ratings and from my own personal experience it is easy to see why. (See post passim for some older material.)

Here is a simple example: go to the website and try to get an individual value plan. Note how it makes you get a SIM card. Tmobile will snail mail the SIM card to you - in my case mailed by them in Texas on a Monday and being received Friday afternoon in California.

Imagine you are tmobile. When would you start charging for service?

1: The day you put the card in the mail 2: The day the customer receives it in the mail 3: When the SIM card is first used on the network

Tmobile's answer is of course (1) even though there is no possible way the customer could have gotten service. Their excuse is that you could have called to use an alternate SIM card, but if that was an option why does the website force you to get a SIM card?

I just finished a call with customer service that took 119 minutes. It took the first 100 minutes or so for the agent to work out what on earth was going on with my bill. It doesn't help that what Tmobile shows customers on their websites is completely different than what it shows agents. She eventually had to hand me over to someone else who could do anything about the errors.

And in the end I did get shafted, but Tmobile has completely drained me. Even the agents were admitting it didn't make sense but kept saying there is nothing they can do.

It is a really strange way to run a business, making customers very aware that everything is rationed (minutes, texts, data) thereby encouraging them to go elsewhere, and then being unable to present meaningful bills, mixed in with hostile policies and unempowered agents for when you do screw up.

Category: gplus – Tags: rant, tmobile

Roger Binns — Sat 23 June 2012

I have a line on a family cell phone plan and wanted to terminate that in favour of an individual plan (makes development and other stuff easier). This is staying with the same carrier. You can't do it online, so how many phone calls, representatives and being hung up on would you think a business like Tmobile thinks is acceptable? The final count was 5 phone calls, about 90 minutes in total, 7 different representatives, and being hung up on 3 times (they seem to do it when taking you out of hold). Almost half the representatives were barely intelligible and I had to ask them to speak slowly and clearly (and no they weren't in foreign lands). How do phone companies manage to run their businesses so badly? I'm glad the calls were recorded for quality and training, but it would be nice to see some evidence of that actually happening.

The irony is I barely use my phone for cellular services. The carriers make it quite clear that minutes are rationed, texts are rationed and data is rationed. So I avoid the phone in favour of other mediums that aren't rationed, and there are a heck of a lot of better alternatives (eg cellular voice quality is miserable). It is like they don't want to have long term customers! #tmobilefail

Category: gplus – Tags: rant, tmobile