T-mobile Treats Customers Like Enemies! Be Warned and Beware!!

After 11 very loyal years of using T-mobile for my personal phone as well as my company phones (and always paying invoices on time) they choose to literally rip me off. At least that’s how I see it. You be the judge. I’m very disappointed with their horrible customer service and the fact that they are so unresponsive.

The issue? I have an iphone, travelled abroad and return to find out that over a 3 week period I have a bill of 33000.00kc!!! (My bills average 2500kc/month.) So I call and am told that it’s all the roaming charges for internet and emails. (I have the unlimited email and internet for 200kc/month in the CR.) Well I wasn’t even using the phone while at my parents since I had my computer so how can this be? They point out that I didn’t turn off my Data Roaming on my iphone and therefore my emails were downloading every 15 minutes for 3 weeks. I wasn’t reading them as I had my computer and never even thought anything like this could happen. (Yes, my huge mistake for not reading the iphone manual and being IT illiterate.) I don’t blame T-mobile for that.

So then what is the problem? T-Mobile offers a special rate called Cestovatel for roaming abroad. Now how would someone know about this if it’s not on their website. (It certainly isn’t on the English version.) They never offered it to me either. I get sales calls (in Czech mind you) all the time, trying to sell me something but they can’t simply let a loyal customer of 11 years know about a great savings using Cestovatel for roaming?

Like I said, I didn’t use my phone much while abroad. I sent a few messages to my husband and called once to let him know we were ok. (I was travelling along with my toddler.) Even so, I would have activated this FREE service if I knew about it to save money.

My April 19th bill for just internet/email use was:
10948.00kc without VAT!!!

If I would have know about their special Cestovatel roaming abroad rate and called them to activate it FOR FREE I would have only paid 1610.00kc!!

The same thing is true for my May 19th bill.
13362.00kc is what I owe as opposed to 1960.00kc if I would have asked for something I had no idea even existed.

So, yes, I have an issue with them and have been trying to contact someone via phone for about a month now. I’ve been in email contact but they take a week to reply and the reply is always the same. They demand PAYMENT ASAP!!! They are not willing to recalculate the cost using the Cestovatel rate. So I’d really prefer to speak to a person on the phone. Is that too much to ask? If I do get through to someone they can’t help me so he/she states that someone will call me back from the complaint department. I’ve been told this repeatedly and to date nobody has returned my call. I continue to call, press 9 for English and many times get hung up on before anyone answers, or I get a Czech speaker after pressing 9 who puts me on hold until an English speaking rep is available, end up waiting 15 to 20 minutes (the other day I gave up after 9 minutes) and finally hang up as it’s obvious an English speaker isn’t going to answer. (I speak Czech but for issues like this I need to use my native language.)

I’ve emailed top management. No reply. I’ve threatened to leave them. They don’t seem to care. Very strange company indeed. They don’t care that they’ll eventually lose a long-term customer and that I’ll spread the word. They just want that money right away.

For your information, I had a direct debit set up for T-mobile so they already received money for the first bill, unfortunately. I stopped payment for the second and am continuously trying to get them to recalculate these past two invoices using the Cestovatel rate. It obviously didn’t cost them that much if they are offering something so much cheaper. I made a terrible mistake by leaving my iphone on, that is my fault but I really truly believed that the company would be happy to give me a rate that they offer anyway for free. You’d think they’d be more understanding. This is a huge amount we are talking about.

We have contracts with them until March2012. One of the contracts is for my iphone so as far as I know we can’t get out of it. They are just like robots saying, pay your bill, pay your bill. There’s no thought put into this.

If anyone happens to have a contact to a senior manager there that can do the right thing please put them in touch with me. I just don’t think they are even processing what happened.