A personal aside: T-Mobile is fantastic

I feel compelled today to share the experience I’ve had since last Friday. This is a little off-topic, but it’s worth sharing.

I have cellular phone service through T-Mobile, and internet through AT&T. I also have a local phone through T-Mobile’s @ Home Service, which is great because it only costs $10 per month and offers free unlimited calling to anyone, anywhere. This is especially important for us because my wife’s family is spread out pretty far across the country, and they’ve all got different phone networks. It’s also nice because they include a pretty nice wireless router that T-Mobile and Linksys put together, you plug any ordinary telephone into this router and it’s on T-Mobile’s @ Home service.

Well, last Friday we had a major lightning strike that fried some of the wiring in our apartment. Our internet went out (which was traumatic, let me tell you!), so when the storm calmed down a bit I called AT&T.

Dealing with AT&T:

After spending about 10 minutes telling a computer who I was and why I was calling, sat on hold for a few minutes, and I got transfered to some guy in India. He was polite, but our communication was slow and cumbersome, and it took us about 45 minutes to go through all the tests required to demonstrate that I wasn’t incometent, hadn’t forgotten to plug in the modem, and that something was actually wrong with the line or the hardware.

He then tells me that he is going to escalate the ‘incident’, which means a ‘technician’ will be calling me in a little while, and that if I miss the technician’s call that they’ll try again 24 hours later, and after that the ‘incident’ will be considered closed if they don’t reach me. So a little while later my wife and I are having dinner when my cell phone rings. It’s AT&T, and I decide not to deliberately skip one of my two chances to talk to a technician.

This time I’m on the phone with a guy in St. Louis, which is great! Unfortunately, he doesn’t really tell me anything new, except that there’s a good possibility my modem was fried by the lightning. He says they can send a ‘technician’ out to take a look at our equipment in 4 days, but warns me that if the problem is inside the apartment, whether it’s the wiring in the wall or the modem, that the technician will have to charge me $60 for coming out, plus the cost of any labor and materials to fix the problem.

Well, I need internet, so I agree. Four days later a technician comes out during the middle of the work day (they don’t come outside of normal business hours, and they don’t schedule a specific appointment, it was just ’sometime between 8 and Noon) and tests the modem, concludes that it is malfunctioning, and gives us a new one. She gets the modem working and says that the fees will be on our next bill, somewhere in the ballpark of $100.

So, after two hours on the phone, dinner interrupted by a call back, four days of waiting, and $100, my modem is working.

Dealing with T-Mobile:

After the modem was working, I discovered that the T-Mobile router was not properly connecting to the new modem. I tried adjusting some settings, but nothing fixed the connection.I decided that I would have to get some help from T-Mobile. I figure it may be a few minutes before we get through to a technician, so I ask my wife to call them and get a technician on the phone while I continue to experiment with the router.

My wife calls T-Mobile, tells them we need help with the router, and then hands me the phone. One minute from call to tech support. I’m speaking to an American who I have no difficulty understanding.

I tell her what settings I’ve already tested, she has me run a couple other tests. Some of these tests require the router to reboot (which takes nearly two minutes), and during these reboots we have a pleasant chat about the Mac Mini that I have the router connected to and how I’m using it as a media hub. After a few tests she decides that we’re almost certainly looking at a hardware problem, and says that she needs Linksys to verify this so they can send me a replacement. She puts Linksys on the phone.

Now, Linksys wasn’t as helpful as T-Mobile, and I don’t know where the guy was from. This part took a little while, because the Linksys tech wanted me to reboot the router after each test. However, he was pretty straightfoward, and after a few tests he declared that one of the ports on the router was not working right, and that we’d need a replacement. Linksys hangs up.

I call T-Mobile again, and in about 45 seconds I am talking to a woman who sounds like she might be from California. I give her a number that Linksys provided me, which she enters into her system. She says, “Oh, bummer, the trouble is in the hardware. I’m so sorry about that, we’ll send you a replacement right away, free of charge.” She then asks me to confirm my shipping address and explains that all I need to decide which shipping option I want. I have the option to pay for rush delivery.

So about 20 minutes on the phone with T-Mobile, and $10 for shipping, and I have a replacement router on the way.

I thanked the T-Mobile technician, and told her that I really appreciated how good T-Mobile’s support has been every time I’ve had to call.

Moral of the story:

I’ve had T-Mobile for about 6 years now, and their customer service has been consistently excellent the entire time. I have never had to talk to someone in India about my problems, I’ve never spent much time on hold, and even when I’ve had to work with a third party (Linksys in this case), T-Mobile has done the best they can to make the experience simple and painless.

Other incidents I’ve had with them are numerous free replacements for phones I dropped or stepped on. They gave me a loaner phone last summer when my 4 year old Samsung finally died and I wanted more time to think about it before deciding to take a free replacement or buy something different. I’ve never had a billing error, and most of my friends who use other networks have. Overall, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with T-Mobile!

Now, I wish that T-Mobile USA would get the iPhone. They have it in Germany, so I can’t imagine it would be that big of a deal to get it working on their network here. But Apple has said they’ll be exclusive with AT&T through 2010, and I’m sure AT&T make every effort to extend that relationship.

I want to like AT&T. They’re a Texas based company, I already use some of their services and could bundle more, and they have the phone that I wish I had. But, in the end, I can’t justify losing the quality customer service that T-Mobile offers. AT&T won’t get any more of my business unless they bring their call centers back from overseas and start acting like customers matter to them.

Lastly, T-Mobile is a much better “deal” than AT&T. They include more minutes for the money, and offer flexible options like ‘my-faves’, unlimited calling over any Wi-Fi network (if you have a phone that can do it), and super cheap (and tax free!) local phone service.

I realize this has been a shameless sales pitch, but I’m feeling pretty strongly about this since it’s taken up so much of my time in the last few days. No, this is not a paid plug (though if T-Mobile reads this and wants to give me some freebies I’d take them! hint, hint). As I said before, I feel compelled to share this because I think people should know.

So, next time you’re shopping for cell service, try taking a look at the company that puts the customer first.