A Cingularly Horrible Experience...
Written: Dec 28 '04
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Pros: All Customer Service Reps were courteous and professional.
Cons: Service after the sale is horribly limited, support call was routed to India for service.
The Bottom Line: When choosing a service provider, look for one that does not outsource call center support to non-english speaking countries!
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| cwcorbin's Full Review: General Reviews of Cingular Wireless Customer Serv... |
Once a happy customer of AT&T, I have been taken hostage by the merger with Cingular, and am now being forced to accept substandard customer service.
My most recent experience involves trying to excercise the warranty on a phone that shuts down on it's own, and drops calls. I stopped into the branch where I purchased the phone, spoke of my woes, and was told that they were having a lot of returns on my particular phone model. The CSR (Customer Service Representative) gave me an 800 number to call, and assurances that they would fix me up.
The call to the warranty center was answered by a non-native english speaker, something new since the merger. (Outsourced customer service to non-english speaking countries is a whole new rant.) Although the gentleman was courteous, it was painfully obvious that he was operating from a script, and incapable of operating on his own. Questions asked that fell outside the scope of his script, would only confuse him, and not provide any valuable results. After a couple of futile attempts, I just let the man work from his script, abandoning any hope of bringing efficiency to the telephonic exchange.
After 15 minutes of questions, answers, and troubleshooting. I was made to repeat every possible serial number, model number, barcode number, and any other number I could find on the phone. At the end, the CSR came to the same conclusion that I had made before placing the call, the phone was a piece of crap. Of course he could not come out and say that the phone was a piece of crap, it wasn't in his script...
So to help me out, he politely informed me of the options available to me to remedy the situation. All of them involved getting a replacement phone of the exact same model as the current phone. "Now wait a minute. Let me get this right..." I ask him. "You guys sell me a phone that turns out to be a piece of crap. You then tell me that you know that the phone is a piece of crap, because a lot of folks are complaining about how the phone, is crap. And to show me that my money (over $200 for this phone) was spent wisely with your company, you are going to stand behind the warranty, by replacing crap with more crap?" Of course my entire analogy was lost on this gentleman for two reasons - first, it was not in his script, and second, as an ESL (English as a Second Language) he really didn't seem to grasp what "crap" is. Perhaps they forgot to teach that common english word in his language class in India.
The story above is basically a summary of three calls I made to Cingular yesterday, but accurately captures the experience. (I actually went through the same difficulties for each of the three calls.)
My only goal was to end up with a replacement phone that was of a different model number than my current model. I was willing to pay the difference between models, but was not given that as an option. I could only receive another piece of crap, or remain the not-so-proud owner of my crap (phone), and pay full sale price for a new phone. It is obviously beyond the scope of Cingular's customer service, to actually stand behind their products and service.
When evaluating your next cellular service provider, I urge you to consider the following so you to do not make a Cingular-ly horrible mistake. Choose a company that...
- Cares enough about their American customers to not outsource customer service to non-english speaking representatives.
- Will stand behind their products by replacing known troublesome products, with upgraded products.
Thanks for taking the time to read my words.
Craig
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 180
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Epinions.com ID:
cwcorbin
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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