How T-Mobile lost a customer over less than a dollar

I've been a customer of T-Mobile for about seven or eight years, but today I'm going shopping for a new cell phone service because the "office of Jay Vanderlay" felt it was more important to collect less than a dollar each month from me rather than put any effort into keeping me as a customer. Here's the details.

I'm not one of those people who texts all the time. I prefer to talk in person or send emails. My phone is for phone calls. I'm old-fashioned that way, or maybe there's just too many mechanical things demanding my attention that I limit their access to my already overloaded brain. So I didn't sign up for nor did I want to pay for unlimited text messaging for ten dollars a month. I already pay almost a hundred dollars a month for two lines and that's already too much for what I get.

This worked fine for many years. I paid twenty cents for text message sent and received and it rarely cost me more than a couple extra dollars a month. Then a couple months ago I started receiving spam texts, several of them a week. All of a sudden I went from paying for a couple text messages here and there to over ten dollars worth a month.

First of all, there really isn't an easy way to contact anyone at T-Mobile to ask a simple question online. They appear to not want to deal with their customer complaints this way so you have to sign up for a service that is basically a forum filled with other people complaining about T-Mobile's crappy customer service.

So I dialed the 611 number and was connected with someone who didn't even know the basics of what I was complaining about. I told him I wanted to not pay for spam sent to my cell phone, which is also and has been for years, on the Do Not Call List. He told me the only way to deal with it was to sign up for the ten dollars a month unlimited text messaging service. He found it impossible to understand or accept there are people in the world who do not text everything. He ended up basically pissing me off by implying I was some kind of idiot for not wanting unlimited text.

So I filed a complaint with the Attorney General's office. This is where "the office of Jay Vanderlay" comes into the picture to totally destroy the reputation of T-Mobile. I keep my phone off when I'm sleeping or working on a customer order as do most sane people who don't want to be bothered. I received a phone call asking me to call a number and an extension. I did and kept getting through to nothing but his voice mail account. The next day I found another message on my phone saying he had tried to get hold of me and failed and if I didn't contact him soon he would tell the Attorney General's office I didn't call him back.

I logged into my account, took a screen shot of all the calls to his office that went straight to voice mail and then I called several more times, the last one telling him I'd taken screen shots of my attempts to call him. I finally got him on the phone.

Not only was he the rudest person I've ever had the displeasure of talking to, he basically said that T-Mobile is unable to distinguish between a spammer sending thousands of text spams through their service (which they get 20 cents per call both from the spammer and from me) but that  it was in their terms of service that they could do this to their customers.

First of all, a company that can't get control of its out of control text spam problem doesn't really speak well of its professional status. But the truth is T-Mobile makes lots of money from spammers. It makes lots of money customers who are forced to receive that spam. And since they racked up some huge expenses and lost tons of customers over the whole mess with At&T, then they have to recoup those costs somewhere.

So I'm going cell phone service shopping today. T-Mobile has lost a customer who pays her bill every month. They've thrown away nearly one hundred dollars a month to keep collecting those spam pennies. It would have been an easy to find a way to keep me as a customer. Give me free text messaging for a couple months to make up for the spam costs. Send me a coupon for a free cup of coffee. Apologize and admit that as a cell phone provider you just don't have the ability to keep up with the big guys. But instead they chose to be rude. They chose to be greedy. And they chose to let themselves be represented by rude, incompetent and prissy little boys. Nice job, guys. And goodbye.

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How T-Mobile lost a customer over less than a dollar

T-Mobile Does the Right Thing

For those of you who read the previous post about T-Mobile raising my rates on the Guam call, this is to let you know they did the right thing and dropped those charges. However, and let me say I can't stress this enough, for a communications company, they sure need to find a way to resolve issues before they get to the stage this one did.

The problem began with me calling when I received the bill and getting told I had no options for a resolution unless I let my bill go into default. I did not consider this a realistic option and after my second call with no one being able to do or say anything consistent, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The problem then increased when T-Mobile responded to the complaint by claiming they had tried to contact me several times by phone and were unable to.

Keep in mind this is a PHONE company who did not leave a voice mail or a text message or even try and call again. I'm not sure WHAT number they were calling "repeatedly" but it wasn't either of mine. I did check on my phone after reading their response and there was a call listed as "customer service" with a phone number from the day after I filed the complaint, but it never registered as a "missed call." Unless I checked I had no way of knowing it was there as they called in the morning while I was asleep.

I called it and was immediately in "no one knows anything hell." I gave up and waited for them to call me back, which they never did. What I suspect happened is that the person calling did not get the message that several months ago we changed the primary phone number to a new one they assigned us because it was getting tons of telemarketer calls and text messages. It's a reasonable assumption that my account would have this noted, or they could simply have called the number the charges were billed to. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption on my part, does it? If you can't get hold of someone, CHECK THE PHONE NUMBER AND MAKE SURE IT'S CORRECT!!!!

Or the other option is "someone" wasn't being completely honest when they claimed they called and tried to work things out with me. Maybe they took off work early and just kind of shoved it aside because who am I but an ordinary powerless consumer against a huge corporate entity that would just ignore my squeaking?

Those who have read my blog over the years know that I am not one to sit back and take stuff like that. I may be shy and have a hard time with in person or on the phone contacts, but I have become very familiar with my consumer rights over the years. I've fought back every time, whether it was getting hit with shipping charges I was promised would be free, a cable company that doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground half the time, and late fees for payments that weren't late. I've won every one of those battles and others. And every month the cable company screws me around, I demand and get a credit on my bill. It's not a lot but it's the principle of the matter: if they don't provide the service I'm paying for, they need to have my bill reflect that.

As a consumer I've noticed in the last few years that more and more  corporations do the nickle and dime gouging that multiplied by thousands does increase their bottom line, but what it does to their reputation and consumer loyalty costs them far more. They've forgotten the most important part of being in business: without customers you're just selling to your relatives and those who owe you favors. If you treat the customer well, you'll have a loyal and happy customer who will talk up your company and build your success. Without it you have unhappy and pissed off customers who will trash you in ways that weren't even possible a few years ago.

Or they won't use your services anymore. I'm sure that Circuit City misses my holiday shopping this year but sadly they thought cheating me out of a ten dollar rebate last year was more important than keeping me as a customer. Anyone check how many of their stores are closing this year because of policies like that? That was a fairly expensive ten dollars and if you multiply it by thousands, then yeah they made some money off not paying those rebates and having someone in India blow off those who tried to collect. But those same thousands could have easily been surpassed by treating the customer decently and selling them new HD TVs to go with the change to digital coming up in February. They chose the ten dollars, which is why their company is in the toilet these days.

But the important message is number one, fight back. They count on you caving in to their nickle and diming, their mistakes, their incompetent outsourced customer support frustration. Refuse to do business at all with companies who don't treat you as a respected and valued customer.

And the important thing is get and communicate everything in writing. In this digital age it is easy to just dash off something and leave it to hang in the ether. Make hard copies of everything. If you communicate by phone, keep a record of person talked to, time you called, and a summary of the conversation. Don't assume a communcations company is going to have communication skills.

And if you still can't get a resolution to your complaint, do file a formal complaint with the Better Business Bureau. They do an amazing job of communication go-between and it does get the company's attention when they receive notice of a complaint filed. For serious rip-offs and outright frauds, there's the Attorney General's websites of your respective states. There's a lot of information on their websites and the one time I had to file a formal complaint, they helped me resolve it.

I don't recommend the consumer fraud people on local news stations, etc. Most of them I suspect take cases that don't conflict with paid advertisers, or they take on cases with lots of cute kids and handsome men and attractive women. If you're ordinary with an ordinary problem, don't waste your phone call or email on "celebrity" consumer advocates. They won't even answer most of the time.

And a resource many of you might not consider is your local congressional representative, especially if you're trying to interface a bureaucracy at the local or federal level. My local rep helped me get a passport after some federal weenie took a dislike to me and did everything in her power to make me miss my plane to a long planned vacation to Australia. Her last words to me were that as long as it was up to her, she'd make sure none of the expedited fees I was charged to send more paperwork after I was already officially denied would ever be refunded. I received a nice fat check several months later so I assume it was no longer up to her. :-)

Stay active, fight back, and stay loyal to sompanies who treat you well and dump the ones that don't. Together we can reclaim some of the rights and respect taken away from us these last few years. All new beginnings start with a healthy dose of activism directed at the right targets.

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consumer rights, consumer protection, T-Mobile, Circuit City, corporate sleaze, Better Business Bureau

T-Mobile Does the Right Thing

Why you should avoid T-Mobile

Here's a holiday horror story for you courtesy of T-Mobile. Once every couple months I call friends in Guam. I don't have a landline and my cell phone has been billed 69 cents a minute for these calls for at least two, if not three years now without a change. When I opened my bill this month I found I was suddenly with no notice, charged 3.99 a minute for the same call! That sent my monthly bill from about 80 dollars to over 400 with no notice from T-Mobile of any change to my account other than receiving this shocking bill in the mail.

I immediately called yesterday but had to call back today because the person who answered the phone said their network was down and she couldn't look up my account. Hello? Your network is down? How are people calling, with tin cans and a string? Okay. So I call back today and talked to a very nice person who told me I was out of luck because T-Mobile has a preferred customer deal going with Guam and it was Guam who suddenly and without notice raised their rates and I was stuck paying this and there was nothing T-Mobile would or could do about it and he claimed they have a right to do this and it says so in the contract, blah blah blah. I sure would like to see this contract as I ordered my phones and service by calling them when I opened my account. I signed nothing and received nothing.

Since we live on a very limited income they leave me no choice but to let my bill get past due and then call their finance department, at least that was the not so helpful suggestion. I have no idea what kind of resolution they will offer but I suspect it will be something like payments. That is not acceptable to me. I feel this is something that T-Mobile is responsible for. If one of my clients suddenly raises their prices on me, I let my customers know so they have a choice to buy or not buy. I don't raise their rates after they've already purchased from me.

So I will be exploring options other than T-Mobile and letting people know about this so you can choose your cell phone service more wisely than I did. I've been a good customer, have never been late with a payment for several years. But this is not right. It is corporate greed at its most disgusting and I no longer want to support it. I'll let you know how it turns out but I don't have high hopes as this is me, one person, dealing with a heartless corporate entity that doesn't give a shit about its customers. I realize they're pretty much all the same but my policy is buy from them until they do something like this, then give some other heartless corporate entity a chance to screw me over. It's the American way.

T-Mobile, consumer fraud, consumer rip-off, Guam, Corporate Greed, Don't get cell phone from T-Mobile, anti-T-Mobile

Why you should avoid T-Mobile