I’ve been tearing t-mobile customer service a new a**hole for the past few days ever since I received an erroneous charge after I had cancelled my service. I have been demanding a refund angrily for the past few days and the best I was met with was a half hearted submission for a refund request that I was continually told would be resolved in 24 hours or 3-5 business days or whatever that never seemed to be resolved. I was convinced t-mobile was abusing some kind of billing policy or my cancellation was incorrectly documented and believed that if I didn’t fight for my refund that it would never materialize. The truth is that’s only slightly the case.
After several calls that went nowhere I was out of patience. I committed to continually calling in and wasting as much of t-mobile’s labor time as possible in my quest for a refund. After calling in today for the second time and requesting a manager and then requesting that manager’s manager I was placed on the line with Kennedy.
The tenor of the conversation started out adversarial as it was my expectation that he would prove to be another in a long line of call center reps that would only pretend to help me, and I suppose it was his expectation that I would be a very hostile customer based on my long history of calls over the past few days. Once he started explaining the billing policy in fine detail and I was given opportunity to ask questions about it and have them answered accurately the tension deflated. I had the issue at hand explained to me and had it acknowledged that my erroneous billing didn’t quite make sense from a customer’s perspective but due to safeguards built into the back end of the billing system my money could not be returned until one month after the end of my final billing cycle. He went on to explain to me how a pending charge had delayed my cancellation and moved the final cycle later than I had expected. He recognized that my account being handled like this didn’t make sense on the surface, but went on to explain some of the complications that have to be accounted for within customers’ accounts. These complications (promotions, device payment plans, etc.) did not apply to my account, but nonetheless the safeguards are applied unilaterally. I just want to shout out the guy for taking the time to actually defuse the hostile situation and even though I spent a good chunk of time on the phone with him he probably has saved t-mobile money and time because if not for him I would’ve continued calling in and being a pill.
The absolute highest standard of customer service makes you walk away with a new perspective on how to handle these seemingly ridiculous situations that arise from modern billing practices, and remind you that the guy on the other end of phone sometimes genuinely wants to help you. As of yet my money is still to be returned, but Kennedy alleviated the feeling of being cheated and abused by an indifferent mega corporation. T-mobile could certainly stand to update its policies and better train their employees, but that’s beyond my control. The only thing I can do is bring to their attention and exemplary employee who saved us all time by just bothering to lay out what was going wrong.
