T-Mobile goes from incompetent to outright patronising
To be perfectly clear - the situation with T-Mobile and the Fax Messaging service has gone beyond a joke. I really did not believe a so-called ‘business’ could operate in such an amateur and ludicrous fashion.
It is now obvious that the call I received from the T-Mobile press office, followed by the numerous time-wasting and pointless calls from someone called Shynai (assuming that’s even the person’s real name) were not sincere. The apologies were hollow and clearly meant as some kind of twisted unfunny joke rather than a professional attempt to rectify an otherwise simple situation that for no good reason has been turned into a frustrating and quite frankly offensive saga.
And to top matters, to think that the best way to handle a customer who is justifiably fed up with all the messing around and lies he has had to deal with from a multitude of T-Mobile staff since this started is to spend ages doing nothing before phoning and reading the same unhelpful scripted responses down the phone over and over again while talking over and ignoring his attempts to explain for the umpteenth time what the problem is and how it can be fixed very easily by implementing one simple network divert setting.
Also - refusing to let me speak to senior technical staff because they are “not customer facing” is pathetic. If these people speak English and haven’t had their tongues ripped out, then they can speak to a paying customer. Using this line is a lazy excuse to avoid dealing with a problem and doing a job properly. Instead you are wasting my time by forcing me to work through a non-technical go-between who isn’t even listening because it isn’t in their patronising script.
I had no choice but to terminate the most recent call, as due to the ridiculous route the call was heading down I was in danger of becoming anything other than polite and civil in the face of such absurdity.
Listen T-Mobile people - we concluded a week ago that your system for auto-detecting a fax clearly doesn’t work properly, so JUST SET A DIVERT ON THE NUMBER YOU ALLOCATED FOR FAXES TO DIVERT ALL CALLS TO VOICEMAIL - thus fixing the problem as then no fax calls will make the phone ring regardless of whether your flawed system can recognise them as incoming faxes.
You can do this, I DO IT ALL THE TIME VIA MY VOICE NUMBER – THE ONE ON YOUR NETWORK.
I’ve been offered a goodwill gesture of free line rental for six months. I will be curious to see if T-Mobile even bothers to apply this to my account. On current performance, it almost certainly won’t happen. While it in no way represents a satisfactory conclusion to this mess (which is still not resolved to my perfectly reasonable expectations), it would go some way to financially compensating me for the hours of my time that T-Mobile has wasted without a second thought.
It is not rocket science, there is no need to keep alienating a customer over it.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
I had a similar experience with T-Mobile recently after being a loyal customer for two years. I had switched to Sprint because T-Mobile didn’t have decent 3G Internet, and requested T-Mobile cancel my service. They cancelled my primary number, but kept billing me for the next three months for the second line on the plan, which I had also requested be cancelled. Their customer service was very cutthroat, and insisted it was my error, and basically left me feeling like I never want to do business with T-Mobile ever again.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:51 am
Have to join in on this rant. T-mobile are the most incompetent company on the face of the earth. I cancelled due to poor network service and similar experiences of customer services - via telephone and in writing, with one month advance notice. They just kept billing and billing me, even resorting to collections agencies and wrecking my otherwise impeccable credit score. They ranged from malicious to disinterested but a general theme was one of sheer incompetence. It is worth knowing, although they do not appear to wish to make consumers aware of this, CISAS is an independent arbitrator - if it’s not rectified three months after you first complained to them, contact CISAS (online). Most people get worn down by the sheer exhausion of repeating oneself which is why they don’t pursue agencies like CISAS, but that also makes T-mobile able to continue to evade accountability. I would never do business with them again and will stick with my old faithful network from now on.
December 14th, 2007 at 3:26 am
[...] customer service is still very poor (though I’ve experienced worse - it’s called T-Mobile), but the actual mobile service has definitely moved up a notch. So much so I bought (note, bought [...]