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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I cannot recommend T-Mobile to anyone any more. Their biggest liability is their customer service infrastructure, which is manned by the same, poorly trained, helpless, and degraded staff as always. In a recent debacle where they forced me into a new plan but promised (in writing) it would only be $30/m. In reality they forced me to a $70/m plan, and customer service was totally helpless. They knew nothing of the forced transition plan, or the letter I had received. Even the executive response team could only force through 2 months of free service rather than honoring their promise.

While I respect the PR they are going for, the reality falls far, far, short, due to years of 'cost management' minded outsourcing and hamstringing of customer service. You simply cannot remake a company if you don't eliminate the cruft of crappy infrastructure. Perhaps they could hire someone from Zappos to start fresh.

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Everyone has a bad customer service story about every company but that does not mean T-Moblie has a customer service infrastructure problem.

Recently, I switched from Verizon to T-Moblie when bought a Nexus 5 on day one. The SIM card I had ordered would not automatically activate which was not a surprise as the Nexus 5 was not in their system (they were not offering it yet). I also wanted their unadvertised $30 plan technically only available to Walmart and their online phone buyers. One call, everything was setup with no problems and no hassles. Verizon is the definition of hassles from my experience.

I had the same experience. They had me up and running with the $30 plan immediately.

For people wondering, the $30/mo plan is a prepaid plan that includes:

- Unlimited Texting - 5GB of 4G data, unlimited 2G data after - 100 minutes, $0.10/minute after

I switched from $90/mo at Verizon. Even my heaviest overages (~200 minutes over == $20) only get me up to $50.

Only downside: as a prepaid plan, it doesn't get the free overseas data and texting offered in their $50/60/70 postpaid plans.

Another potential downside is that the $30/month plan does not support roaming data. If you are in an area not covered by T-Mobile's towers you will not have data service. Voice and text will still work fine. I speak from experience here.

I'm certainly glad you've had a good experience. I don't want anyone to have bad experiences. I think the way things should work is that people with bad experiences speak out and people with good experiences do the same. Due to my experience I won't recommend T-Mobile, but everyone should take the balance of published experiences into account when choosing where to shop.

My litmus test of customer service organizations is how they handle unusual situations. If they sound helpless it's a very bad sign. If they come up with creative and/or generous solutions, its a very good sign. In your case they had a button to press that they were allowed to press and they pressed it. In mine, they had no button, and quite probably were told internally "Don't help too much." In experiences I've had with stunning customer support (Dropbox/Zappos) the button didn't exist, they had to invent it, then they pressed it as hard and as fast as they could.

> Their biggest liability is their customer service infrastructure

I think this is a problem with all of the major US mobile carriers. I have heard so many bad customer service anecdotes about all four carriers that despite being thoroughly disappointed in my own carrier's horrible customer service (AT&T), I do not think switching would help things.

> I do not think switching would help things.

yeah, everytime i hear someone in the US says he switched mobile company because of customer service, i think of the simpsons episode where Earth is enslaved by some aliens and homer says "I voted for the other [alien that would also enslave Earth] one".

Ironically, Mesh networks never took off because everyone would be weary of having your data, even encrypted, passing trhu random people networks. Little did everyone know the telcos were the worse on this front.

The secret is to get on a corporate account. I've never been on hold nor had a bad experience with AT&T's corporate support. It's actually kinda refreshing dialing 611 and instantly having a real person answer the other end.

Their biggest liability is very little coverage outside of cities no coverage even in many cities (Iowa City, for example, has no T-Mobile coverage at all), and poor coverage in a lot of major cities (San Jose, for example).

I must live in a different San Jose then - I get solid LTE for a huge part of SJ and my house which is on the border gets LTE in the house - this is a big change from AT&T and even Verizon data wasn't as good.

TMO data coverage is good enough for me that it's invisible whether I'm on wifi or mobile for the most part.

Note: the state of broadband on the open road is quite bad - I couldn't TMO anywhere in Oregon solidly, and even Verizon was quite horrible there as well (have an iPad3 with 4G).

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