Mar 28
New Cell Phones Again From LetsTalk.com
So you may have seen from my previous post that I ordered cell phones for my wife and myself over a year ago. We had a T-mobile family plan. Service & everything else was good, but we didn’t seem to NEED them. So we decided we would cancel our plan and live without for a while.
It turns out we couldn’t have picked a worse month to cancel our plan. We had all sorts of issues, like me transfering jobs, our son getting sick and going from ER to ER… Don’t worry, my son is fine and I got a new job, but it sure would have made things a lot easier to have been able to communicate better during that time.
So we’ve decided once again to get cell phones. Having learned what we like and dislike about our phones, we picked out something cooler! We both got these cool new Sony Ericsson Z520a phones. I read a lot of bad revies that the camera button is really annoying and takes a lot of snapshots when you don’t mean to. I don’t know if they updated the firmware or what, but you have the hold the button down for a while just to get to the camera mode to take snaps, so it really hasn’t been an issue.
Of course, I went to LetsTalk.com again to order the phones. They made it easy to compare all plans and phone at a glance. Plus, they tend to save you the hassle of shopping around and speaking with annoying sales people!
June 29th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Unfortunately, I’ve been having a much different experience with LetsTalk. com. They have hands-down the WORST customer service I have ever experienced (and that’s saying a lot!).
My fiance tried initially to order a family plan with two free cell phones (after several rebates) but the order process barely passed Go. The LetsTalk reps had a hard time verifying his SSN and requested for him to mail them his actual card, even after they received a copy of it. Each time one of us would attempt to call their so-called customer service line, we were put on hold for an average of 20 minutes (often longer) before getting a live representative. We would get contradicting answers from different representatives. We got so frustrated that we cancelled the order in his name and started one in mine.
I had to call them five times , and email them twice, before the order was correct and approved. Once we received the order (by this time, it had been a month since our first order attempt), we were happy enough with our phones, and found the accompanying letter claiming their customer service was their primary concern laughable, until we discovered they had printed the wrong phone number for one of the phones on the packing slip. This seemed relatively minor until we also found that they got this same number wrong on the rebate slip. I’m in the agonizing process of trying to rectify this situation so that we can get our rebates processed properly. This is far from over, I’m sure, but trust me, we have earned every penny of our rebates and then some in this grueling process. You may be wondering why we persisted in ordering from LetsTalk when we had such awful dealings with their customer service from the start. It must be the allure of great, but so far, unattainable, rebates. And a little masochism.
June 30th, 2006 at 5:46 am
I can really relate to you actually. I did blog about this later, maybe out of pure exhaustion from dealing with their customer service, but I have my own horror stories now.
The plan with Cingular sucked - simply put. They advertise the fewest dropped calls, but this was the first time in my life I’d ever experienced dropped calls - at a frequent rate no less.
So I called Let’s Talk and they called Cingular and told us we could return everything, which we did. Then we ordered a new plan with T-mobile.
This is where it gets really confusing. We had a plan with T-mobile previously and they said we would have to go back to our old plan. So we ordered Verizon. Then we get both the Verizon phones and the T-mobile phones in the mail. Somehow our order with T-mobile went through. So we sent the Verizon stuff back without ever opening it and went with T-mobile because it was cheaper.
I was told I would have to call Verizon and cancell, which I did, but the Verizon customer service department screwed up and never cancelled.
Eventually I got that worked out.
Well, now I just got a bill from Cingular. Apparently our account is still active with them??? Ugh!
The problem with Let’s Talk customer service is not necissarily their service, but their employees. I think they’ve outgrown themselves. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing there. You get someone different on the phone every time you call and have to explain the whole situation again, then you get different responses on how to go about solving your problems.