Thoughts on T-Mobile's Customer Service

Just wanted to share a quick thought on my experience with T-mobile. I've been with T-mobile for a few years now (ever since the Treo 270, back when the Treo was a flip phone with a T|C-esque form factor... remember that?), and over the years I've generally been satisfied with their level of service (they replaced my Treo 270 twice and my Treo 600 at least once). This weekend I was reminded again of why they consistently rank highly in JDPowers surveys on customer satisfaction. Some time ago on Palm Addict we mentioned T-mobile's special promotion giving current customers free access to T-mobile wifi hotspots on weekends (expires May 29th, US only). So, as a T-Mobile customer, I've been enjoying this promotion and visiting Starbucks on the weekends with my laptop. Well, in order to gain access to the wifi network, you have to enter your T-Mobile phone number on a certain website, and then T-Mobile sends you a free text message with your passcode for wifi access. Well, a few days ago I notified that I was actually being charged for these supposely free text message. While the charge amount was minimal, it still bothered me, so I decided to call up T-mobile customer service. To my surprise, I was talking to a human being within 5 mins of dialing! Not to mention it was about 1:30 AM at the time, and the person spoke perfect American English. While the woman wasn't able to completely fix the problem, she patiently did all she could to help, and gave me extra text messages to prevent being charged again for these supposely free text messages in the future.

So today, I checked my online billing again, and discovered that the woman on the phone might have made a mistake in attempting to correct the charge. So I called T-mobile again, this time at around 7pm. Once again I got through to a human being within 5 mins of the call! The lady on the phone was just as helpful as the last, and she seemed to work really hard to help resolve my billing issue, and even going as far as to promise that she will personally review my bill again in a week's time to make sure that everything was fixed. Very impressive!

I was really surprised by how positive my experience was T-mobile customer service turned out to be. It really is a shame that T-Mobile decided not to offer the Treo 650 on their network. As I consider my upgrade options for my Treo 600 (if i should, and if so, to what device), I'm finding that the benefits of staying with T-mobile for their customer service don't seem as strong as the benefits of switching to another provider that does support the Treo 650 and beyond. But who knows, maybe I'll decide to stay -- not completely sure what I will do yet. Anyways, just thought I'd share some of my thoughts on T-mobile with the PA community =)