Cingular rant

Earlier this year, I got myself a Motorola RAZR, switched from T-Mobile to Cingular, and got a family plan with my wife, who'd been with Cingular for years.

I just spent two hours on the phone with their customer service people trying to straighten out my bill, which did some very weird things that ultimately ended up over-charging me by about $22. To avoid a long rant, let me merely say that their default style of rattling off numbers, rapid fire, in no particular relation to where they occur on the bill, is not a productive way of convincing a customer that the bill might actually be correct. Once I started working through it, line by line, we eventually reached agreement.

What a pain. I think the moral of this story, if there is one, is that the two hours I spent weren't worth the $22 I ended up saving, even though about half of that was listening to hold music and web surfing.

After 5 years of dealing with Pacbell->SBC-> Cingular, I never speak to the first two people I talk to. I instantly ask for a manager or level 2 tech. It's amazing how much more conciliatory they get the higher up the chain you go. If I get someone on the phone who doesn't sound nice, I ask for someone else. It's not worth the time to deal with someone who either can't speak well or obviously has no clue about what's going on. Most of the time I know more than the automaton reading the script book at the other end of the phone about how their system works. Give them a soc (sp?) code for some service and they think you are a manager yourself. =]

Latest fun: I was just in France for a week for a conference in Nice (yeah, pretty rough). Before I left, I called Cingular to get my phone approved for international roaming. It took three calls and the best they could say was "it looks like the request went in." Anyway, while I was in France, I was able to call out fine, but it appears that nobody could actually call me. (This was probably a feature, because otherwise I would have been getting calls at odd hours.)

On my bill, I discovered a weird $5.99 charge that, after much grunging through Cingular's web site, appeared to be their "Cingular World Basics plus Western Europe" package that says you pay a flat $0.99/minute rate (comparable to the standard T-Mobile plan, only T-Mobile doesn't charge the $5.99/month part). The Cingular rep apparently chose to put me on this plan without ever asking me, although in hindsight, it saved me a bundle on their "normal" international roaming rates ($1.29/minute for airtime plus long distance that could have been another $2/minute, the latter charge being completely undocumented on Cingular's web site).

The solution, for how rarely I travel out of the country, seems to be activating these things when necessary and promptly deactivating them afterward. (Or, buying prepaid cards if I'm going to be abroad for more than a few days.) Who knew it could be so complicated?

I have my very own Cingular rant to contribute. A couple weeks ago I started my search to get a Treo 650, and was reading a lot of forum posts and articles about Cingular's confusing and convoluted pricing for data plans. From what I was reading, Treo 650 users were being charged a much higer rate for data than users of other devices.

So, I went down to the local Cingular store, and spoke to a sales rep, who was, surprisingly, very knowledgeable. She was familiar with the pricing scheme differences, and said that Cingular are now making a distinction between devices that are "primarily data devices" versus devices that are "primarily phones" and that the Treo 650 fit into the former category. That may be true to some extent, but the service is *exactly the same service* and the difference in price is astounding: $20/month or thereabouts for unlimited data for a "phone" and $79.99/month for unlimited data for a "PDA" like the Treo 650.

Now, as it turns out, some users had managed to get their Treos going on the Cingular network with the cheaper plan, but the sales rep told me that Cingular were starting to deactivate data service on those accounts until the owners settled up. Sure enough, the forum posts started rolling in, with people whose data service went out, and when they called, they were greeted with a friendly "give us more money" from the so-called "customer service" reps.

So, I decided to buy a Treo 650 from Sprint instead, for the same price, but only $15/month for unlimited data usage, and apparently that can be $10 if you play your cards right. Now, I'm not sure what Sprint's service is like in my area, but if it's good enough, Cingular will lose me as a customer. Not that they'll notice...

Really, I think this is pretty typical of a company that suddenly becomes the leader in market share, and thinks they can push everyone around (see also Comcast.) Unfortunately, Cingular's not as much of a monopoly as Comcast, and if they keep this up, I think they'll be finding out just how many users are willing to test the waters elsewhere.

</rant>

Well, while we're ranting I have several about Cingular, but it'd take too long to go through them all. We finally switched to Sprint and have been much better off.

The funny thing is, what finally made us switch was that we didn't sign up for a new contact with Cingular because we were considering switching. We just were going month to month after our contract ended. A couple of months went by and they told us that if we didn't sign a new contaract then they'd jack our prices up. Kind of a "sign a contract or else". We chose "else".

Jeff

Apparently Cingular's call system disconnects you after an hour, incidentally. I had a friend who ordered a Treo 650 from them which they misshipped, and he spent a lot of time getting it corrected... amplified by being disconnected while on hold with the right people several times.

On last night's NBA game, I saw an ad that the Motorola RAZR is now only $200 (versus $500 when it was new six months ago). I decided to go see what the Amazon price was, and amazingly enough, the RAZR is now free after rebate (versus $350 after rebate, six months ago). Free is a very, very good price for a RAZR.

Wow.