Ric L. is having problems with T-Mobile’s CSRs—specifically, they don’t seem capable of actually making any changes to his account or recording anything about his calls, and when that leads to $75 in extra fees, they say they can’t fix it and offer him “free” text messages. Ric says he suspects the CSR he talked to “takes the responsibilities of his job about as seriously as a cat with a ball of yarn,” but we all know that’s incredibly disrespectful to cats everywhere, who take their various activities quite seriously. Read Ric’s email to T-Mobile after the jump.

Mr. Dotson,

Although I’m sure you get many e-mails on a daily basis from customers that are less than pleased with the service that your company provides I’d like to give you some idea of my recent dealings with t-mobile customer care.

I am a SmartAccess customer with a 1000 minutes family plan for two lines. On January 22nd I paid my balance in full of $220.00 online. This balance included several dollars in overages related to txt messages in excess of my plan. After paying my balance I attempted to change my text messaging bundle on the t-mobile website. It stated that “due to the status of my account” I couldn’t make any changes. Not wanting to incur more charges in the future I contacted customer support by dialing 611 on my blackberry and asking customer care to make the changes to my account.

Two days ago I received a text from t-mobile stating that I was nearing my spending limit. A bit taken aback that I’d be anywhere near the limit I logged in and checked my balance. There were in excess of $75 in text messaging fees on my account. I e-mailed customer support online to get the issue cleared up.

Tonight at 11pm EST a telephone call that I was on got disconnected and my service suspended. Not having received any reply from t-mobile support by e-mail I attempted to call customer care to get the issue resolved.

Apparently (and this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this) the call center agent that I spoke with on the 22nd not only didn’t make the changes to my account, didn’t place any notes on my account but also failed to even pull my account up to look at it. I can only assume that he takes the responsibilities of his job about as seriously as a cat with a ball of yarn.

Due to your customer call agent’s pure incompetence my account is suspended. Had your employee done his job I wouldn’t have incurred the over $75 in text messaging charges that put my account over it’s limit. I find that unacceptable.

I’ll be the first to admit that I got a bit short with your call agents tonight. That might have something to do with their absolutely infuriating habit of cutting a customer off in midsentence and interrupting at every possible opportunity. You customer call agents are not only incompetent, they’re immensely rude. I don’t like being told that nothing can be done to remedy an error on the part of your company. According to your agents my only option is paying off these charges. The sheer idea of offering me “bonus text messages” as a remedy for my “inconvenience” is nothing more than an insult.

Although I may be a SmartAccess customer I’m also a governmental customer and a customer with a long standing clean record with your company. As such I expect, no I demand, that something be done about your company’s complete lack of customer service. The whole point in having customer care and billing agents is to provide your customers with resolution to service problems. The fact that your call agents have no way to bring remedy to a situation is absolutely assinine, what is it exactly you pay them for?

Cordially,

Ric

The thing that troubles us the most about this is it demonstrates how you can be screwed over by a rogue CSR, who can just pretend like your call never happened and leave your account unaltered. This is why we’d suggest never trusting a CSR’s word for anything—always check your account the next day online and call back when you inevitably see that the change hasn’t been made.

(Photo: gumuz)

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