Last January, my company decided to standardize on a single wireless vendor. This makes sense, since most don’t charge for in-network calls. We went with Cingular, and I had the opportunity to get a new wireless toy. Yay!
I got a Blackberry, since it was cheap. Well, cheap it was, and also unusable for my needs. (The biggest dealbreaker was that since we’re not stupid enough to run Exchange, the actual email intergration is pretty hopeless. It doesn’t do IMAP — in fact, it doesn’t really have a client of its own at all; it just syncs to the feature-free server at RIM. One of the upshots of this is that all messages from the Blackberry must come from the same address, and you get no copies of that message in your “sent” box unless you CC yourself manually. It’s a hopeless tool that’s succeeded largely because people haven’t seen better. Add to this the immature nature of its PIM apps, and you’ve got a tool I can’t use.) No problem; Cingular had a regret policy that allowed me to swap it for a Treo 650, so I did. (Actually, we kept the Blackberry and passed it on to the marketing dude.)
A month later I got a HUGE bill, whereupon I noticed a couple things:
- For some reason, data plans are different, and using the Treo on a BB plan resulted in HUGE overage fees; and
- They’d put me on a 2-year contract, which was contrary to what I told my corporate rep, improbably named “Tivarri”.
A phone call to Tivarri got both straightened out (complete with lots of charge reversals), or so I thought. (Yes, Tivarri had checked the box for 2-year-committment, and I hadn’t noticed before, so that’s kinda sketchy, but she said she’d fix it — and since I paid full price for the Treo, there was no reason to suspect she hadn’t.)
Well, turns out the Treo isn’t the best phone in the world. In fact, it’s a crappy phone. It’s also a crappy Palm, compared to the other dedicated Palm devices out there. What it’s good at is “being both in one box,” but only at the expense of being so poor at either other job that you’d never pick it under any other circumstances. The real dealkillers, though, were the phone complaints. Its signal strength is typically very weak (even when other Cingular phones are doing fine), its volume is too low, etc. By late summer I was pretty Done with the Treo, and willing to move back to separate devices.
So December rolls around, and Cingular’s having this sale on RAZRs, which is the phone I want. I call to verify that I can upgrade, and they tell me no, my contract isn’t up until NEXT January. Um, WTF?
I explained all the above, and that the corporate rep was supposed to have fixed this last winter, and the nice lady at Cingular gives me no bullshit and says she’ll follow up by today.
Today the phone rings, and it’s some other dude at Cingular following up FOR the nice lady because she’d out sick. I give a summary of the situation, he reads the notes, and says he’ll call me back in a little while.
And HE DID. All taken care of. My contract is now up for renewal, and I can have the December deal on the RAZR despite it being January. Cool. We hang up. I call a store, check availability, and plan to drop by around 5. My phone rings again. It’s Nice Dude again, wanting to tell me that because of the run-around, they’re putting a $50 credit on my account.
No yelling. No bullshit. No real runaround, honestly. Tivarri should’ve gotten it right last January, but I also should have noticed she put me down for 2 years, so it’s partly on me, too. Even so, they fixed it AND then threw money at me, and with minimal effort on my part, and after years of dwindling quality in customer support interactions across the board, it’s nice to experience GOOD customer care for a change.
