Verizon and Cingular both suck
:: Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 @ 9:10:34 pm
:: Tags: Rants
It is possible for a wireless communications company to not suck?
I’m switching my Blackberry to Cingular so I can be international with it, but will remain with Verizon for voice. This involves getting new phones, and both Verizon and Cingular have totally botched the orders, requiring me to spend frustrating amounts of time talking with service reps. Some of them are nice, but all of them are telling me totally different things.
Cingular screwed up my shipping address not once, but twice. Just now, I called in to check on the Verizon order, and when I hung up, I promptly received an e-mail receipt claiming that I had just ordered a (second) phone (for a different price, even). The two, identical phones I supposedly ordered are on different systems, and neither side can access the order on the other side.
What. The. Hell.
The thing is, I wasn’t surprised at all that the orders were messed up, as failure seems to be the norm in this industry. Quite an amazing celebration of incompetence, isn’t it?
UPDATE 12/29/05 After a few more calls, I finally managed to get Cingular to send me a Blackberry. It was amazing; it took 5 or so service folk to realize that their “verification” system for addresses was truncating half of my business address here in New York. Lame. And when I received the thing, the identification numbers on the Blackberry were wrong in their database. Can they do anything right?
UPDATE 12/30/05 I had to call back yet again to get WAP added to my account on the backend. At least everything appears to be working now…
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cingular is incompetent. there’s no debate there.
i’ve had good experiences with sprint so far, but the fact that i’ve had to talk to customer service reps on at least ten separate occasions makes me wonder if there could be a more simple, automated process of doing things (perhaps online). and i’m totally sick of hearing the same silly statements over and over that they’re trained to say, like, “aside from … is there anything else i can help you with today?” at the beginning of the phone call, and, towards the end, “to recap, here’s what we did today…” and, “how happy are you with your service today?”
i’ve been an at&t customer my entire mobile phone life and was recently switched everyone over to cingular when at&t was bought out. well i thought i lost my phone a few months back and walkd into my local cingular store to purchase a replacement phone. you’d think this would be easy.
a. they sent me to a bigger cingular store down the block for assistance
b. i couldn’t purchase any of the cingular phones b/c technically i was an at&t customer still (?!?!)
c. i was given the option to switch to cingular so i could purchase a new phone, but i was also mid-contract with at&t which would result in a heavy penalty fee
d. they referred me to a third-party vendor to purchase an unlocked phone
w.t.f. seriously, w.t.f. ?!
Time to get 2 cans and some string because T-Mobile ain’t no prize neither. I’m not impressed with their so-called award winning customer service. I agree with you about Cingular sucking.