It’s hard to do without a mobile phone these days. Whether it’s for ringing home, keeping in touch with friends or using the Internet on the move to access e-mail, update Facebook and Twitter or access information via the Internet. The trouble with them is that to use one you have to deal with mobile phone companies. They are all only to keen to try and sell you a deal, but in my experience customer service is appalling and they do everything they can to make money out of us. Recently I’ve had experiences with three companies which makes me question their business practices.
Case 1 – the water damage con
I took out a contract on a high-end smartphone. After 6 months I had a problem when I tried to update the firmware. It froze and wouldn’t turn on. So I took it back to the shop who sent it away for repair under warranty. It came back a few days later unfixed. I was told it was water damaged.
Well that was nonsense. I don’t know what they found (they showed me a meaningless picture but my phone hadn’t been anywhere near water) but insisted the warranty was void and they weren’t going to fix it (but would sell me a new phone to resolve my problem, of course). I wasn’t chuffed to put it mildly. But when I got it home I found that when I turned it on it worked. I suspect a hard reset was all that was needed (wish I’d tried that first).
Looking at the net there are loads of people who have suffered from the “water damage” con. It seems to me that either the phone companies are selling faulty goods (which can’t cope with normal atmospheric humidity) or they’re deliberatley looking for non-existent faults to wriggle out of their warranty obligations and make more money by selling the victim another phone.
The company in this case? – Vodafone .
Case 2 – Failing to cancel a contract
My wife took out a contract for my daughter. She rang up to cancel it when my daughter took out a new contract with the same company. My wife rang up and cancelled it. A bill arrived every month.
This month my daughter cancelled her contract. A bill still arrived. Turns out that they weren’t sending out a hard copy bill for the newer contract (it seems it could only be accessed on the net). The bill that had been arriving had been for the older contract which my wife had cancelled. On ringing the company they acknowledged that they had a record of the instruction to cancel the contract – they just hadn’t done it and had continued to bill us.
The company in this case? T-Mobile
Case 3 – Charging for customer service calls
T-Mobile have the cheek to charge 25 pence for every call to customer services – even if its to sort out a problem they have caused. Disgraceful.
Case 4 – Failure to cancel expensive insurance
My daughter replaced her T-Mobile phone with a new one from another company. She was talked into signing up for the company’s insurance on the basis that she could “cancel it within 14 days and pay nothing”. She found cheaper insurance elsewhere so rang in and cancelled the insurance. Guess what?- her bill included a charge for the insurance
Company this time? O2
Conclusion
We’ve experienced problems with three different companies. The most generous conclusion I can draw from all of these cases is that the companies are incompetent. They can’t really be dishonest can they?
