A few years ago I switched from Cingular to T-Mobile because Cingular’s customer service stunk. My experience today was another proof that I made the right choice.
Late Saturday night my beloved Samsung T509 had full signal in my apartment, but I couldn’t place or receive any calls. Heading outside, I walked six blocks before my calls would go through. Some kind of cell phone black hole was centered right on my apartment. What a bummer, especially when you’re trying to order pizza without a landline.
So the next morning I went out for brunch beyond the boundary of the black hole. I called T-Mobile with a forkful of chilaquiles and expected to wait on hold. Much to my surprise, T-Mobile doesn’t make you wait. They take your number instead and call you back. Three minutes later, my phone rang. The girl on the other end was friendly, listened to my problem, apologized, and told me she’d send an engineer asap. She couldn’t promise a response before Wednesday due to New Years, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
Today my comatose phone gave a familiar chirp. T-Mobile had texted me this message:
An Engineer has reviewed your trouble ticket and a resolution has been found. Thank you for choosing T-Mobile.
After making a few calls and dancing around the room, I had to reflect on this. T-Mobile nailed this support experience from the beginning through the middle to the end.
1. I never had to stand in line
Waiting on hold sucks. T-Mobile knows it so they gave me another option and called me back.
2. The agent cared about my problem
The girl on the line was kind, attentive, and apologetic. She made me feel like it was their problem and their responsibility. Which is exactly what I want as a customer. She also promised an update by a specific date, which eased my uncertainty.
3. When the problem was fixed, I heard it from them first
I received a text message as soon as my service was restored. That little victory SMS taught me that when they have downtime in the future, I can trust they will work quickly and notify me when it’s fixed. It’s so frustrating to repeatedly pick up the phone every half hour to see if it works. Thanks to their communication, next time I can relax and wait for the good news.
Kudos to T-Mobile for the good example.
Sam
on 31 Dec 07I always had the same excellent service from t-mobile. I would highly recommend them for people who care about customer service.
Whitney
on 31 Dec 07I am so glad someone else recognized the great customer service work that T-Mobile has. I too switched carriers (from Sprint to T-Mobile) due to customer service issues, and still to this day I don’t regret paying the disconnect fee.
Josh Santangelo
on 31 Dec 07I was with T-Mobile for about nine years, and stuck with them mainly due to their awesome customer service, even though other providers have better coverage in my area. If they had the iPhone, I would still be with them.
Shawn Medero
on 31 Dec 07I’m honestly surprised… I have had the exact opposite experience with T-Mobile customer support. Long hold times, conflicting information from different representatives (on the same call even), and general ineptitude when it comes to explaining the fine print. (And then there was the recent communications debacle concerning whether or not using Twitter was within the Terms of Service.) Now, whenever my call has been elevated to higher levels of customer support things have improved dramatically.
As far as technical service… well my friends and family (Chicago, Philadelphia, Tampa) have experienced a unusually high number of dropped and missed calls for the last three months. Additionally, service in Philadelphia is average at best. (A person next to me with the same phone will have three bars in an elevator or in the subway station on Verizon or AT&T while I’ve got no service at all.)
The web experience of T-Mobile’s customer support and billing center leaves a lot to be desired as well.
Anyway, it sounds like you had a great experience and I just wish T-Mobile would treat me the same way.
Wade
on 31 Dec 07I totally agree. I also switched to T-mobile many years ago from Cingular. Canceling my Cingular service was a nightmare. I got so frustrated with the neverending attempts to keep me from leaving that I lost my temper and yelled at the person on the phone to cancel my account already. Not something I tend to do.
Shawn Medero
on 31 Dec 07Oh and there’s also the confusing nature of the T-Mobile brick & mortar stores. You can’t get customer service there… only new service activation. Anytime I’ve walked into these stores (the ones in the Philadelphia region at least) I’ve been told I have to call customer support… or with enough haggling they basically call customer support for you.
Matt Brown
on 31 Dec 07T-Mobile’s myFaves plans, where you get to call a predefined list of five people an unlimited number of times, is truly the best decision I’ve made in years, in regards to my cellphone usage. Not only that, but they put a nice circular animation on your phone’s home screen (similar to the floating circular animation on Amazon.com with the books/cds), which allows you to easily switch between people and have them represented graphically.
Kevin Hillabolt
on 31 Dec 07I’ve had great experiences with T-Mobile as well. I’ve had instances in the past, where my Blackberry service was a bit flaky – a quick call to support and a resolution was soon reached.
It’s a shame Apple went with Cingular, oops, I mean AT&T with the iPhone. I certainly understand the market share aspect, but dang, what a bad partner to cozy up with. It saddens me every day, because I’m jonzen for an iPhone.
Sunil
on 31 Dec 07I switched to Cingular from T-Mobile a few years ago (and would have eventually because of the iPhone). The one thing I miss is their customer service. They were cordial, quick to elevate, and always solved the problem. Customer service at Cingular is like walking through a maze.
But the reason I switched was coverage. Coverage on Cingular was vastly superior to T-Mobile at that time. Not sure if T-Mobile has since caught up. But great customer service was not worth anything if I couldn’t make a call.
Mike Sax
on 31 Dec 07Yes, I love T-Mobile. And unfortunately, I love the iPhone more. T-Mobile not only has great customer service, they also have very reasonable plans where they don’t nickle and dime you to death. For example, they have free Blackberry tethering, and they even had a $20 “unlimited international data” option for my Blackberry. It was so nice to be able to travel internationally and not have to worry about how many emails I was getting. I really miss T-Mobile, and I would probably pay several hundred dollars extra for an authorized unlocked iPhone if it had Visual Voice mail.
Tim
on 31 Dec 07Is the iPhone really that great.
I’ve played with it a the Apple store and seen my friends.
It looks pretty but doesn’t seem very functional.
pacific
on 31 Dec 07Wow…I had the worst customer service experience with T-Mobile. Their system is terribly slow and their representatives are not professional at all. I’m planning to switch to other carriers as soon as there is a good deal.
Brandon Eley
on 31 Dec 07I completely agree. I have been with every major US carrier including Alltel (when they were Cellular One), Verizon, AT&T/Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile.
T-Mobile was by far the best customer service we ever experienced, and we were with them the longest. The only reason I eventually switched was because I traveled and frequently had problems placing and receiving calls in rural areas. T-Mobile needs to spend a few million on coverage expansion and they’ll get a few million customers away from other major carriers as a reward.
I’m currently with Cingular (now AT&T) and the service is… ... ... but anyway, at least I’ve got an iPhone! Maybe when it’s open to other US carriers T-Mobile will have better coverage and I’ll switch back.
Marc Tiedemann
on 31 Dec 07Sadly T-Mobile didn’t have this great of a service when I needed it. Especially sad when you consider that I am living in Germany where the company’s roots are. So basically we over here have the iPhone bound to T-Mobile but bad service. My iPhone wasn’t able to recieve calls when in sleep mode and I had to go 6 times to the local T-Mobile store to have it finally send in to repair only to find out, that when it was returned “no failures where found”. Great. I then send it in directly to Apple and got a new iPhone. Great!
But as always this an individual experience and I don’t want to mark this experience as a general thing. I also had some good times with the hotline in the past. Just stupid to run into major problems when the shit’s really steaming already.
Rob Poitras
on 31 Dec 07Another happy TMO customer here. Their blackberry plan is great (noted earlier). Every time I call into customer service they are always helpful. Wait times are usually a little higher then what you experienced but still within reason. I have nothing but good things to say with the 4 years I have been with them.
Andrew Conard
on 31 Dec 07Ryan – Thanks for sharing your thoughts both about T-Mobile and about interacting with customers. As a pastor in a local church, I think that these insights are also applicable to interactions within a congregation. Thanks!
Eric
on 31 Dec 07T-Mobile support is probably the best corporate support I have every had the pleasure of working with.
I tried their service for 3 days and canceled. Two months later I received a bill because the kiosk where I returned the phone never canceled the contract. The person was apologetic and humorous; she reviewed the account, confirmed the phone was returned and canceled the account. A month later I received another bill with the proper credit applied and the account fully canceled.
This is in stark contrast to the 6-8 hours of my life I wasted on the phone with Verizon just figuring out how to get their EVDO service turned on, billing screwups fixed, and then turned off.
Jeff
on 01 Jan 08I remember using T-Mobile’s airport wifi service for the first time: similar experience with their great customer support. It’s remarkable that a large company can consistently do this, probably because it’s a German company :) Good on them!
kris
on 01 Jan 08that’s a really good customer service experience. i wonder why no other mobile operator has the simple sense to call back or text when the problem is fixed. it costs them nothing, but adds so much in terms of satisfaction…even though there is a genuine problem.
in india, vodafone has the (supposedly) best customer service, but it still sucks (and has been getting progressively worse every year). other service providers not only cause dissatisfaction, they even blatantly rip off customers. i hope someone with initiative from one of these service providers reads this post and does something about it. it’s high time :)
Samo
on 01 Jan 08I find it funny how in this day and age, where companies are supposedly competing really hard for their customers, only very few companies actually value them.
I’ve had and heared of countless examples of companies dealing with customers as if they’re an annoyance at best. And then the managers go on and on about a “difficult market” when they start losing customers.
Manuel Martensen
on 01 Jan 08Glad that works so well for you “over there”.
But at t-mobiles homecountry, germany, they are not that clever. The only thing that is ok is, that it is a freecall number, even when you call from a mobile.
You have to answer 3 questions to the computer. First question can only be answered via voice, so you need to be without noise that surrounds you, which makes it tricky in a crowded cafe. Second question needs to be answered via voice as well: “Is this problem associated to do with the number you are calling from?”. If you decline you have to type in the number in question.
After that you have to wait for a human to answer your call.
Sometimes the computer states that they are too busy right now and that you should call back later. Sometimes, but not everytime (this probably has to do which call center you reached) they ask you if you would like to wait anyway. And sometimes you wait for 15 minutes (and the computer tells you 6 times the same story over that time, that you can place your problem online as well and tells you the url without any dots but with slashes: tee minus mobile dee eeh slash support — which is irritating for people like my dad — and then you get a human on the line.
And sometimes you even get disconnected after 15 minutes.
If you are lucky you will be connected to a human who then asks for your number in question again for whatever reason that is.
Same company one would believe, but different support tactics, even differering between the 40 german call centers.
Manuel Martensen
on 01 Jan 08Regarding my comment above:
This is probably because T-mobile has to conquer their market position in the USA. I believe they suck in germany because they used to be the only ones here (and they are still the biggest) and because they are No. 1 when it comes to overall coverage (almost 100% nationwide umts/gprs coverage).
Lazy bastards on a throne.
Jonathan
on 01 Jan 08It seems odd that many high-tech services like mobile telecomms can’t seem to invest properly in customer service. Maybe it’s because they’re all so obsessed with “shareholder value” – AKA reducing costs and maximising profits come hell of high water. Sub-sub-sub contracting to India for customer services and other things is pretty normal, as is nobody actually understanding how the whole system works until a customer needs to know.
Joseph LeBlanc
on 01 Jan 08One of the ways T-Mobile keeps their costs down is through the way they do billing. If you want to switch to another plan, it takes effect with the next billing cycle instead of prorating to the current one. A friend of mine used to work in a call center for a cell carrier that prorated. Easily half of his calls had to do with billing, even though he was supposed to be doing tech support.
T-Mobile also doesn’t have any plans where you have to pay for roaming (at least, if you’re within the US), so that’s another potential billing issue avoided. It seems that they’ve taken the money they would have spent on all of the extra billing support and channeled it into technical support.
Unfortunately, the coverage does leave something to be desired. When I’m visiting family, I can’t get any coverage at all unless I’m in the next town over.
Robert Brewer
on 01 Jan 08But back to the blog post topic…
“The agent cared about MY PROBLEM”
Well said. I find this particularly insightful because there are too many customer service teams who have been told/scripted to “care” without any context. No, I don’t want you to care about what I had for lunch or the weather or when my baby is due or how my local team is doing in the playoffs; I want you to care about the quality of the service you’re providing for me. Big difference. I’ll have to remember that myself for the future.
Serge Lescouarnec
on 01 Jan 08I was with Cingular and now ATT Wireless and have experienced bad to awful customer service with both of them.
I had ongoing billing issues with them, had to call them three billing cycles in a row to hopefully have the problem fixed definitely. My last conversation with them was with a supervisor who told me I could not contact her office by e-mail but that she would call me back. 3 months later, I am still waiting to hear from them.
A headache!
Milos Krneta
on 01 Jan 08I am glad to read this text. I only can dream about support experience… Here in Serbia I call it support torture. Is it ok to wait 15 minutes while some stupid music plays?
Rob
on 01 Jan 08I have to agree – our company has all of our phones with T-Mobile and I’ve had good experiences with their tech support. I did have one issue that required a few calls to get resolved (VPN access for our T-Mobile Connection Cards) but the tech support people were honest and kept trying to solve the problem and updated me on their progress. The only thing that is starting to get really old is the lack of 3G – that’s a killer for our highly mobile workforce.
A German
on 01 Jan 08I would be glad if the t-mobile and telekom customer support was this good in their home country, but it’s just about the opposite.
Jeremy Ricketts
on 02 Jan 08Luck.
I’m starting to think that all instances of good customer service related to cell phone companies (and telecom companies in general) is just that- a matter of luck.
Katie Kelly
on 02 Jan 08I had a great experience with T-Mobile too. A few months ago my phone went through the washing machine. Having dealt with other cell providers in the past, I was expecting that they would use this opportunity to sell me a new phone. Instead, when I brought my phone into the store they told me that the phone was fine and that I just needed a new battery, which they gave me for free.
Rob
on 02 Jan 08Glad you had such a great experience; and glad that I could be a part of it. I work for the software company that provides the callback technology you mentioned. We’re called Virtual Hold Technology. And one more thing: We just started using Basecamp to run our projects.
Karmadude
on 02 Jan 08They do have and amazing support, and I had a similar experience when I had to get a Blackberry Pearl unlocked. Very patient, friendly, and knowledgeable support, and as promised I got the email with instructions to unlock the phone in the 7 days they said it would take.
Anonymous Coward
on 02 Jan 08Not phone related, but I have to give some kudos to Dish Network as well. Turned my TV on yesterday and it said No Signal. Do some troubleshooting and determine that it’s not the HDMI port on the TV, or the Dish receiver itself because the signal is working out of the RCA jack. Hop on their support site, fire up the live chat page, type in my problem and what troubleshooting I had done. Immediately got connected to a tech, at 10AM on New Years day which I was impressed by. He had me do two routine troubleshooting procedures (resetting receiver, powering off/on receiver). Didn’t work so he connected me immediately to second tier support. Guy comes on and says the video card is fried, we’ll send you a new one (UPS 2-day), just confirm your address. Didn’t make me jump through an hour of troubleshooting hoops. Didn’t even have to pull out a bill to give them my account #. I was quite pleased. So the lessons would be: trust your customers, don’t assume they are idiots. Create a process that is easy for them but covers you too (i.e. they send me a new receiver basically no questions asked, but will charge me if I don’t send the old one back).
Arlen
on 02 Jan 08Customer service is king – as several people have noted, I too have had fantastic service from Cingular. I never wait long on hold, and often the representative goes beyond just doing what I ask – they perceive the underlying issue and propose a more direct and thorough solution. Now that’s what I call excellent. Customer service that is not only cordial and readily available, but also engaged and interested in helping me with the core issues at hand.
By the way, I can only recall one time when I called about an actual problem (never had any others), and that was a simple plan upgrade/billing issue that they quickly resolved for me. Oh, and I’ve been with Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) for more than 4 years.
Charlton
on 02 Jan 08I had a T-Mobile phone a few years back, and the customer service was so bad I swore I’d never use T-Mobile again.
I’m glad they worked well for you, though.
I suspect that to some extent these things are regional, or local, in nature, at least as far as actual service is concerned: at my former residence, it was impossible to get FedEx to deliver. (I have a lengthy tale involving the president of the company that sent the parcel, two regional FedEx directors, a personal guarantee from one of those directors that the parcel would be placed in my hands, and no parcel, that I’ll spare you now.) But UPS was reliable and dependable, and I could count on the drivers to follow directions (leave it in the vestibule, bring it around back and leave it on the patio). I have friends in other areas that have had the opposite experience.
Nagu
on 02 Jan 08I had horrible experience with t-mobile in the past that I dread calling them. Tried unlocking the phone and that put me on an infinite loop of transfers (call this 800 number blah blah – after calling that number after couple of transfers, a dude was saying – call this 800 number blah blah)
I was surprised at your experience and hope you are not on the ‘widely-read-bloggers-list’ getting special service :-)
Try unlocking the phone thru them!!!
Anthony Kuhn
on 02 Jan 08Ryan:
It’s good to hear a story of outstanding customer support, although, as some of the other commenters pointed out, it can be an individual experience not representative of the overall experience any given customer has while using T-Mobile customer support.
I cross linked to your post at the Innovators-Network in my blog with hopes that some of my readers will visit this post and learn from it, as I did.
Best wishes in the New Year,
Anthony Kuhn
Jonathan Watmough
on 03 Jan 08I have to put in a word for ATT here. I was over in the UK and was having problems getting my cellphone to work over there. I called the ATT helpline from a regular phone, tech support answered quickly and was able to fix my account, both texting me, and calling me on my cell, and having me call them to verify that all was well. I must also agree that T-Mobile, through their Hotspot people, also give great service. Supporting WiFi hotspots in varied locations such as retail and hotel settings can’t be the easiest job in the world, but the T-Mobile hotspot people have always been great to deal with.
Keith
on 03 Jan 08Nightmare canceling Cingular…try XM…
My dad calls the XM customer support line and waited 20 minutes on hold. The lady then told him that she couldn’t help him and transferred him. Another 20 minutes on hold and he got someone. He said he wanted to cancel…the phone disconnected.
Okay…fluke. He calls back. 45 minute hold. He again told the person he wanted to cancel his subscription. Again…the phone disconnects.
He called a third time 15 minute hold. He told the person he wanted to cancel. The phone disconnected the second he said the word cancel.
So…my folks handled the cancel via e-mail (which requires a goofy amount of information to handle an account cancellation) with XM customer service. They got an email back saying, “We’re happy to offer you a special 3 month trial rate to keep your business.” They finally just said, “Cancel the account and confirm via email.” 3 days later they got confirmation of the account being canceled.
Mike
on 03 Jan 08You might not have to wait long for the IPhone on T-Mobile’s network I’m sure that this is something in the works. Exclusive right’s to the IPhone should be up sometime soon.
Karen
on 03 Jan 08Buyer beware: The T-Mobile website quotes that they “support EVERY phone they’ve ever made, back to 1998”. I have a T-Mobile phone from 2003 that needs a battery. They don’t stock it, can’t get it, and say that providing batteries does not come under the definition of “support the phone”. Hmmmm.
Anonymous Coward
on 04 Jan 08hj
miles
on 05 Jan 08Ditto on excellent T-Mobile Svc. Major reason I don’t have an IPhone is the poor ATT service we had a while ago before switching to TMobile.
Tom Peters has been raving about benefits of good customer service for years – it’s amazing so many CEO’s don’t see it – makes you wonder if they’re really worth all that money.
Lucia
on 05 Jan 08When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I evacuated to Florida. It came time when my family’s bill was due, as was my sisters. So first we went to the Cingular store to pay my sisters bill. Snotty attitudes refusing to realize that their service had not been working in our home town for that past month, charged her.
T-Mobile waved our bill for the month. :)
This discussion is closed.