T-Mobile's approach to transparent customer service falls short on many of the basic tenets commonly used in the tech industry today. Rather than continue to gripe about the shortcomings, I thought it might serve me (and other T-Mobile customers) if we could address how a few changes could vastly improve the relationship between provider and customer and bridge the chasms the existing policy causes.
Create a Trouble Ticket
When a call is made to T-Mobile continuity on follow-ups is severely lacking. The notes made by the "expert" cannot be seen by the customer to offer any assurance that when they are told something there is a record supporting that statement.
Currently, when a customer calls back regarding a continuing issue they effectively must start from scratch explaining the issue and working their way through layers of repetitive question/answer sessions before getting to where they left off on the last call.
This is a tremendous waste of everyone's time and is the most frustrating aspect of T-Mobile's customer support. To the point that it feels as though this is an intentional tactic to discourage the customer from using the support channel to resolve the issue because it can be so time consuming.
Being assigned a Case Number, and that number being referenced in My T-Mobile so that the customer can verify that the "expert" has understood the nature of the issue and can show the next "expert" where to pick up where it was left off last time would be easy to implement and would increase efficiency significantly.
"Experts" should be willing to verify with a supervisor when something is ambiguous
I was involved in a two hour chat where an "Expert" (Marygrace) consistently claimed the ONE Plus discounted rate of "$10/line/mo for +2 lines" that is advertised only applied to what they called the "Family Plan." Honestly?
Is there even a T-Mobile One Unlimited plan called the Family Plan? No, there is not. In the description of the ONE Plus add-on it clearly states,
"To get ONE Plus, you need to be on a T-Mobile ONE™, T-Mobile ONE™ Military, T-Mobile ONE™ Unlimited 55+, or T-Mobile ONE™ w/ ONE Plus plan"
(why you would want to add ONE Plus to the "T-Mobile ONE w/ONE Plus" is a question I can't answer) Nonetheless, it seems any reference to a "family plan" is in regard to any T-Mobile ONE unlimited plan that includes more than one line.
Despite being unable to provide a link explaining this unique perspective she held, essentially claiming that no T-Moble ONE Unlimited account holder (whether regular, 55+, Military, or other variant) could have this rate applied when adding ONE Plus to a postpaid account of any sort. Every link she provided fell short of supporting her argument and repeatedly supported the ad, my interpretation of it, and at no time was she willing, when I asked her to approach a supervisor to resolve the misunderstanding. When I finally gave up and ended the chat she had the gall to phone me in order to keep her private war to deny a discount to a customer going. Unbelievable.
This is not an isolated incident in my experience. Logic and reason do not seem to be something the "Experts" are trained in applying. In fact, it is seldom that an "Expert" will take a stance that will provide benefit to the customer. Instead they tend to err on the side of increasing the T-Mobile profit stream, even when it obviously contradicts the published offers on the website.
This needs to be turned around. Providing paragraphs of kindly sounding platitudes while obfuscating the facts is not an effective method of building customer trust.
At least make an attempt to take the customer's side
Nearly every contact I've had with T-Mobile Experts has left me feeling as though their directive from above is to thwart providing the customer the thing they asked for, were promised, and fully expect to receive based upon the advertising pitches and published terms and conditions.
At no time has any of the fluff statements and typed niceties ever seemed to me as being sincere. Instead, they come across as a corporate spiel meant to quell any ire the "expert's" actual stance of denying the customer any modicum of actual service will invoke.
Go through this a few times while attempting to understand the responses multiple "experts" provide to any given issue and it becomes clear how this is a script or mandate that is part of their training rather than holding any level of sincerity on the part of the "expert" spouting it. Please stop doing this. It is embarrassing and infuriating when it is so clearly a ploy to avoid addressing the question at hand that further wastes time.
If instead, the expert had the resources to investigate the customer's claims regarding how T-Mobile has not delivered what was promised and expected, then, lead the customer to the best way to achieve their expectation, or, at least provide documentation to support what is preventing resolution. This seems to be a rarity and many who post here regarding their experiences are left feeling as though the support offered was only a sugar-coated attempt to do anything to keep from addressing the issue in any satisfactory manner.
And again, there needs to be a way to document what happens in each instance that both the customer and the next "expert" can mutually access, and which can be referenced by number. How many times I've heard "this will be done in the next 24 hours" only to have to call back in when it hasn't, only to be told that "it will be done in the next 24 hours" as if I wasn't told that already three times over the past week. It is bordering on the insane, which is so often defined as "doing the same thing over and over while expecting to get a different result."
If a customer has already been through the designated period of time, take their word for it and troubleshoot why it didn't happen. Don't put them through the same endless loop over and over again.
The customer should be the one to decide when an issue has been resolved
Each case should remain open and available to all parties to review until the customer closes it. This would prevent the inconsistencies I have experienced where one "expert" tells me this, and the next one contradicts them. Without a record of what has transpired before the customer does not know who to believe.
