Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisiszen | Hacker News Reader

Personal anecdote that shows how customer service laser-focused T-Mobile is:

Last week the T-Mobile CMO announced a nationwide campaign in which existing and new customers could turn in any Blackberry and get $200 towards a new phone (it was a response in regards to the CEO of Blackberry blasting them the day before).

I had just switched over to T-Mobile a couple of days before (so that I can upgrade phones whenever I want with their Jump program) and gotten $0 for my Blackberry. Usually I don't bother but this time I wanted to carry out an experiment on T-Mobile's customer service and see if I could get them to retroactively honor the Blackberry deal.

Long story short, I twitted their CMO (I'm nobody on Twitter) and he got back to me within 30 minutes. The next day I got a call from T-Mobile's corporate that my account had $200 in credit!

Now, I'm their number one fan.

View on HN

I agree. I paid an ETF months ago before tmo announced the deal where they would pay, so I called them and asked if they would honor it. Turns out they wouldn't go back that far, but gave me a $50 credit for calling.

I was a loyal T-Mobile customer for years, but now I'm their number one enemy.

In short, I moved to a new state and my house appears to lie between three misconfigured towers. Multiple phones, multiple models repeatedly dropping calls and texts. Diagnostic app showed phones constantly hunting between towers. T-Mobile customer service abysmal--their motto seems to be FOAD.

Finally paid the $800 termination fee to be rid of them. Both StraightTalk (ATT network) and Verizon work perfectly at this location.

The moral of the story is not that T-Mobile sucks (though they do). Rather, never, ever enter a multi-month agreement with a cell carrier. They are simply not to be trusted.

I had the opposite occur for me. I reported a similar problem and they said they'd dispatch an engineer to check on it. Three days later everything worked perfectly.

Must be nice. For over eight months, we had no response of any kind, nor any indication that they had any interest in looking into possible technical issues on their network. In their final denial letter to us, they stated that based on the coverage map on their website, we could "expect excellent voice and data service" (at the location where we'd had constant drops for months).

Their customer service is great on the human side. Their website kind of blows, although they're not alone in that. I spent maybe a half hour trying to figure out how to get a different-sized sim card on their website, before giving up and calling. The phone call took maybe two minutes and the new card was in the mail.

Someone I knew was in a similar situation but, unlike me, was in a hurry. They _overnighted_ him the sim card for free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com