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Another Way Carriers Screw Customers: Premium SMS 'Errors'
An anonymous reader writes "Almost no one likes their carrier. And with the behavior described in this article, it's not surprising. TechCrunch catches T-Mobile taking money from a new pay-as-you-go customer after signing her up to its own premium horoscope text message service — and taking money before she's even put the SIM in the phone. Quoting: 'Perhaps carriers think they can get away with a few “human errors” in the premium SMS department because these services aren’t regulated. Perhaps it’s also symptomatic of the command and control mindset of these oligarchs. What’s certain is that if carriers dedicated a little of the energy they plough into maintaining these anachronistic, valueless (to their customers, that is) premium SMS ‘services’ into creating genuinely useful services that customers want to use then they would have a better shot at competing with the startups leapfrogging their gates. Or they would, if they hadn’t spent years destroying the trust of their users by treating them like numbers on a spreadsheet.'"
...if they hadn’t spent years destroying the trust of their users by treating them like numbers on a spreadsheet.
Clearly this was the work of a video gamer.
As I type this, my father is on his phone yelling at his carrier. He's now spent over 20 hours this month yelling at them over the same billing error. He's furious, and it all makes sense.
I have the same carrier. I'm very happy with my carrier. But I've done things very differently. And I continue to do things differently.
The carrier did mis-bill my father. Absolutely and without question. Whether or not it was intentional is optionally obvious. But it's irelevant. My father, like most people, calls them, expects them to work out the issue on the phone for him immediately. And while we all know they should, and they could, it takes twenty minutes and then they don't. Again, intentional or otherwise is up to you.
I've seen all of you guys get frustrated with this sort of thing. So I've solved the problem. Here's what I did, and what I do.
First, I have a "business account". The only difference between a business account and a consumer account is that I asked for a "business account" and they call it a "business account". Otherwise, it's the same. All plans are available to me the same way. If anything, it actually reduces the availabitily of customer support because I need to be transfered to a business account person. Again, true or not is up to your own belief system.
Second, I don't expect anything to ever get done immediately over the phone. About once a quarter, sometimes once a month, I have some sort of an issue to deal with. Maybe billing, maybe account change, maybe whatever. I call, I leave the phone on speaker-phone until I get the right person -- sometimes I'm on hold for twenty minutes, rarely but sometimes. Doesn't matter, I'm working to hold music instead of to my own music, big deal.
Then, I ask for whatever I want. If it doesn't get done and solved perfectly in five minutes by the first reasonable-correct agent, I simply say: "I need to go, please work this out and call me back tomorrow at this time." 90% of the time, that's exactly what happens, and it's perfect. The remaining 10% of the time, if they don't call me back and it doesn't get done, then I walk into the physical brick and mortar store, and say exactly the same thing -- to someone wearing a manager tag. I smile, I shake her hand, I flirt a little (it works between men too, by the way), and I ask them to do me the personal favour and call me back with the solution -- and I give them a full week.
I think a lot of you forget that, assuming your phone is functional, all of these billing- and plan-, and account-related issues can be worked out retro-actively. There really is no rush. It's not urgent.
So I live a very happy life. I get problems solved within a week, with minimal time and effort spent by me. Why does anyone need any more? You deserve to have your problem solved. You don't deserve to have your problem solved within an hour.
Fixed.
If customers find them valueless, why do they sign up for them? They are optional. So optional, I've never heard of them even after being a ten year customer of T-Mobile.
Often they don't sign up for them, they just magically find themselves signed up; and all attempts to "unsign up" and get a refund are met with the carrier disclaiming all responsibility and refusing to do anything.
Back when I was on Orange, I was signed up to 2 premium SMS services through no fault of my own on 2 separate phones (one of which had never been used). Orange wouldn't do anything about it other than continue to bill me, they informed me that I needed to contact the SMS service provider and insisted that I had somehow signed up for these services, even to the point of "well maybe someone else signed you up on a website without your knowledge". In one such instance the conversation went something like:
"You need to contact the SMS service provider and have them stop the messages and send you a refund"
"Ok, can you give me contact details for them?"
"Yes, their number is 0123456789"
"That number doesn't work - I just get a number unobtainable tone"
"Well, you'll need to contact them about that"
"How do I do that then?"
"Their number is 0123456789"
"I just told you, that number doesn't work - can you give me some other contact details?"
"You'll need to ask them"
(This conversation went round and round for a good few times before I gave up).
At the end of the day, I _did_ manage to get both SMS providers to stop sending me messages; I even got a refund off one of them. I was left about a fiver out of pocket with the other. The financial cost was small, the time and hassle cost was high. And this is why they get away with it - if it had been a significant amount of money, I would've taken Orange to the small claims court; but it was about a fiver, so not worth it. Multiply that by thousands of customers and it just isn't in their interest to be customer focussed about these kinds of issues - they're making money by screwing the customers, but the amount they are screwing each customer by makes it not worth that customer actually investing the time to do something about it.
http://blog.nexusuk.org