pmsumner

What's the use in a website with online billing for self-service / online billing, trying to reduce on calls to Customer Service and get people to do as much as they can without an employee's intervention, when the damn thing doesn't work when you actually need it most?!

*grumbles and grimbles*

I think I'll just spend the rest of the night bitching about stuff - even if nobody else listens :)

I know, I think about work too much

OK, the basics... every T-Mobile phone account has two ways of enabling certain things - one is by adding a "SOC" (these are generally chargeable, or things that aren't included in your "core package" like Picture Messaging or SMS allowances) or by turning on a "Feature" (These are inbuilt to your price plan - things like Caller ID, SMS, Roaming, boring stuff).

Recently, I noticed that when we've been doing price plan changes, any changes that are going through are automatically having a new "Itemised Billing" SOC added. I thought nothing of it for a while, but today I was looking and thinking about it, wondering why they would make this change? I mean - why change something that's not broken? Having it as a feature worked really well! Then... then I hit on the answer.

Note my wording in paragraph 1: "SOC" (these are generally chargeable....) - I bet you within 3 months, T-Mobile announces that they are going to start charging for itemised billing. No, I don't bet - I guarantee you. As far as I can remember, every other UK network does this already. T-Mobile have been making some very unpopular changes lately - changes that we've not been consulted on and definitely not been given advance warning on...

Some examples - CSG (Cust Satisaction Guarantee) has been removed completely. We got a week's notice on this. When you took out a phone with us, you used to be able to change your price plan once a month, to anything you wanted that we had available. As of tomorrow (today) this isn't the case. As of now, you take out a phone and can't change to a _lower_ charging plan within 6 months. What else? Changes to pricing which are going to cause merry hell, changes to price plans, withdrawal of price plans, some of which seem to me, to be insanely bad decisions.

I don't get it somedays.