I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for several years.
They were the first to offer decent options for using your US phone overseas; they were also the first to unlock your phone for overseas sim cards. Those were reasons I originally liked them. I also liked them because they were a German company that I knew from my years living in Berlin.
Fast forward a few years and I’m living in Hungary. I’ve lived here nearly a year. I have a T-Home account (cable package) and a T-Mobile pre pay sim card; The sim card allows me 5oo GB of data per month for $8.80, and charges me per minute for the calls I make. It has worked well, but gets costly.
Photo Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/
Spending Your Saturday at T-Mobile and Other Things I’d Rather Not Do
This weekend I decided to brave it and visit T-Mobile and get a new phone plan. I say brave it, because I’ve visited T-Mobile here in Hungary on at least five occasions; getting out of there in under an hour is nearly impossible; one day I was there over two hours! T-Mobile is a main provider of mobile phone service in Hungary, and they rarely have enough customer service agents.
Rarely do they share all the plans for cable packages they offer without you raising your voice and saying absolutely not. Rarely do you get someone who knows all the English language TV plans. T-Home, here’s a tip; Customer service matters.
Train your employees to know all the plans and options. I had to have the assistance of my Hungarian speaking landlords, and three customer service agents over an hour and a half to get the plan I wanted. That’s not good customer service.
Silly me for thinking getting a new phone plan would be a straight forward process. After all, I’m an account holder already. I might as well have been from MARS for all the good it did me. In fact I was so peeved that I called a Hungarian colleague who specializes in helping our work staff on just such problematic occasions.
Despite Being an Account Holder, It Was Still an Awful Experience
In my possession, an account with T-Home, a prepay plan with T-Mobile, my passport and my residency card; still it wasn’t enough. They have to have an official address card. This is basically a folded in half index card with my address written on it, and a single stamp. (Trust me, it is very basic.) Certainly not like the official looking residency permit card I carry in my wallet. None the less, despite speaking to my colleague in Hungarian and having me melt down and be the Ugly American, I still have no phone plan.
After speaking to another colleague, whose wife is Hungarian. I feel better. She was also at T-Mobile yesterday and had a similar awful experience. She ordered her phone two weeks ago and was called on Friday to say come in and pick it up tomorrow. She arrived to pick up her phone and they told her not only is it not here, but it’s not available. What?! She was a very unhappy customer. What’s the deal T-Mobile? You’re so important you’ve forgotten who made you important; YOUR CUSTOMERS? World Wide customers keep you in business. Personally, I’m happy to go elsewhere, where my business is appreciated.
*Though I am a T-Mobile customer, they did not ask me to write a post about how peeved I am at them; or how they can’t think outside the box.
