Bowled over by T-mobile

It's rare these days to call a customer-service line and end up feeling ... delighted, impressed, surprised, amazed.

Here's my story with T-mobile (US), and why you should consider them if you are thinking about a mobile operator right now. [Disclosure: no one paid or contacted me to do this post.]

The beginning of the call set the perfect tone. A computer voice chimed in and said: "If you'd like to use our automated system, please press 1 now."

Wow, wow, wow. This is the first company I dealt with (in the last 5-10 years) that does not presume that I want to speak to their chatbot. Their default assumption is I want to speak with a human being, but also it's a quick press of "1" to reach the chatbot. Just brilliant.

Contrast this with every other call - you are desperately pressing "0" or some random numbers, or yelling "operator", "representative", "human", hoping that somehow the system will let you switch to an operator.

I was then put on hold. The wait was probably about 5 minutes. During this time, the computer voice reminded me of the option to switch to the chatbot, with helpful commentary, such as "if you want to do something simple, such as checking your balance, you can press 1 to switch to the automated system."

The problem I had was most likely a computer glitch. In one week, the system claimed I have used up my entire month's of broadband data. That is highly unusual. Either there was a bug in measurement, or somehow I visited a "bad" website that loaded a lot of junk I was not aware of.

Here is where I encountered the second grace. The service rep actually was given the power to think and solve problems! No mere reading from the script. After we spent maybe a few minutes going back and forth, she said let's solve the problem, there is no point in explaining where it went wrong (we didn't have the relevant data anyway), and she offered to reset the usage, which is exactly the solution I had in mind.

Finally, she hit the home run. She explained that the reset would take a couple of hours, and she would call me back to confirm that it's done. We agreed on a time. She called me, and confirmed, which took less than a minute.

So, T-Mobile, job well done! Please keep it up. I'm a fan.

Comments

[Antonio Rinaldi]

There is a scene in Demolition Man (1993) describing exactly what you write for a police call center.