Forum Discussion
Extremely long (multiple hours) hold times during the past week --- why?
Situación
Long hold times -- hours -- for customer service started recently. Even a requested "warm transfer" to an expert for a particular technical question placed me on hold for another ninety minutes.
Impacto
T-Mobile customers do NOT have such time to waste. The response that "too many people are calling" seems like an excuse and not reality. Trust in T-Mobile is impacted, particularly when requests for compensation for long hold times are met with the statement "we never do that". (Even though I have had such requests honored in the past.) This situation can cause even long-term customers to consider alternatives
Response
Please T-Mobile, be honest and tell us if you have fired all US based "your team of experts" folk. That is the only reason I can see for a sudden huge increase in hold times,
T-Mobile needs to address this issue
Exactly they don't want people to be able to cancel their accounts it's should be illegal. I can't believe how corporate companies are. Wish we could go back in time and fight to get more laws to protect against these evil entities. My line doesn't even work been on hold an hour because you can't cancel online. There are so many sites you can cancel online there is no reason but to make it hard.
The best time to call for the shortest wait times and to have your best chance at getting a rep from the US, is at 7AM ET. T-Mobile still maintains a handful of US based call centers for postpaid users. All prepaid will be served by outsourced overseas reps.
I hate to say it, but what do you expect? 100% of T-Mobile’s customer service is offshored (and I don’t mean to single them out; the same is true of AT&T, Verizon, UPS, FedEx, your credit company, the “card services” department of your heretofore “local” credit union, etc., etc.).
In defense of offshoring and understaffing, when we are paying, say, $50/month for T-Mobile home Internet, or about $125/month for typical postpaid cell phone service, the company loses money the minute a human -- even someone earning 60¢ an hour in the Philippine call center -- answers the phone. (If T-Mobile still had US customer service staff, their wages would be the main factor, but with offshoring, it's the overhead -- the high-volume international telecommunications capacity, the ticketing system, the call distribution hardware, the management, the profit for the contractor, the cost of the stateside procurement department that writes contracts with offshore call center vendors, etc.)
Now, a better company would have more reliable systems and services, so calling customer service wouldn’t be a weekly or monthly or even an annual activity.
But beyond that, we all want to talk to real, fully-empowered corporate employees in the US, and we are not willing to pay the cost of quality customer support.
If there were an option to pay a few dollars a minute for premium support by real people here in the US, I would happily do so. It's the combination of lousy underlying services from T-Mobile and our own price sensitivity that explains why we have to wait for hours to talk to a Third-World temporary call center worker who can only read from a script, and lacks the knowledge, as well as the authority, to actually do anything.
