The T-Mobile Shuck and Jive

I recently bought a new I-Phone at T-Mobile and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

It wasn’t pleasant because what I thought I agreed to didn’t get reflected in the first bill. The future charges weren’t reflected in the agreement, either.

T-Mobile should have explained that the first direct deposit deduction would be higher because of a conversion charge, and the bill in second and succeeding months would be what I agreed to.

BTW, the sales rep didn’t have me sign that I agreed to anything spelled out in the contract, which is in my mind a major problem, because I could legally void the whole deal.

When I ran national telemarketing for MCI, we prided ourselves in transparency, and it paid dividends in customers actually calling our lines wanting to switch.

I could probably take this contract and agreement problem to the Arizona Consumer Complaints Division, and get the whole deal thrown out, but a nice young lady named Savanah at my local T-Mobile store did a good job of explaining what the contract said.

And I like my new iPhone.

BTW, Apple, it’s my fourth I-Phone.

So, T-Mobile needs to do some training of salespeople in their stores, to get more transparency in their transactions. And rewrite some of their language to indicate what the succeeding months will be after the first month, so there are no surprises.

They might lose some transactions, but they’ll gain customer loyalty. And they’ll save customer sales reps time, because they won’t have to explain what’s going on after customers are surprised.