Austrian wireless carriers have battled one another for a long time; causing steep price droops and rock-bottom-cheap plans. Unfortunately, as a side effect, shop clerks get less and less skilled. Readers recently reported me loads of horor stories about T-Mobile Austria…time to print them out.
Availability whac-a-mole
T-Mobile Austria offers special contracts to members of the press - these are clearly advertised on the web.
However, shop folk knew about 20% of the available options - wonderful… . A request to talk with the supervisor was ignored.
Contract whac-a-mole
The friendly guy above has sold yours truly bread and groceries for like 5 years now. In fact, his uptime is actually higher than mine - nevertheless, he experienced a lovely game of whac-a-mole at T-Mobile’s.
When porting his age-old tele.ring contract to T-Mobile(same mother company), the company requested 5 different credit checks. And no, they didn’t request them on block - but rather piece-per-piece. So…he ran to the shop five times…in vain.
Additionally, three clerks independently told him wrong information about included free minutes - they claimed 1000 free minutes for each competitor network, but the plan offers only 1000 for all of them combined.
Data whac-a-mole
Essentially a copy of what was written above, except that it happened a year ago. Shop guy told me I had 500MB free…but I had only 250. Cool!
Service outage? I don’t care!
While T-Mobile usually is reliable, outages truly strike you hard. I once had a GPRS outage at 2400 night and called a hotline. The conversation was approx. like this:
Me: You have an outage
CC rep: Call tomorrow
Me: Mate, listen up - this is a SERVICE OUTAGE!
CC rep: I don’t care*click*
In the end, low rates benefit everyone - but they should IMHO not be financed on the expense of customer care. The examples above could have caused gigantic issues to the affected folks…something that definitely should not happen…ever…
What’s your personal carrier peeves?
P.S. I forwarded this post to T-Mobile’s press department - let’s see what they say in response!
I guess they will say nothing at all - or maybe they will start to care about customers: in short, German Telecom employees were told to not look and respond to customer complaints etc. (read story here, unfortunately only in German http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,533393,00.html)
Hi,
Verizon in the US is also notorius for bad customer service — once spent 4 hours in the shop trying to get them to replace a faulty battery only to learn they sold me a phone that they shouldn’t have offered -> me SOL!
altogether cellular companies in general stretch their boundries, imo
Ryan on the run….
5 credit checks? Yikes!
I don’t know if the rules are different over there, but in Canada and the U.S. one of the things included in a credit check is how many other credit checks you have undergone recently.
Too many of them at once means you may be recklessly falling into debt, and therefore are a bad risk.
I hope your friend’s credit is still okay!