I've signed up for T-Mobile service, as I'm travelling a lot more and have outgrown Tesco Mobile.
You'd have thought by now the operators would have got this provisioning thing down to a fine art.
Wouldn't you?
This is going to be predictable, isn't it?
OK, so it's not too bad so far, but there's a long way to go.
Before we even begin, the lady at the business sales desk is so desperate to get me off the line and start her next call (guess what she's incentivised on) that she reads out the number and details of where to fax my registration details at top speed without even pausing to see if I'm ready to write them down. Whoa there! Start again, but she still reads it all out damned quick. Get one digit wrong on that fax number, potentially lose a customer. She should be asking me to read it back to her to confirm I got it! (Interestingly, there was no attempt to up-sell me anything -- business accounts seem to have every possible option thrown in for free.)
First problem: they can't provision T-Mobile Hotspot access at the same time as the rest of the account. You need to call back after you're a customer. Wonder how many abandoned sales that leads to?
Next problem is that I want to access the self-service web site. It asks for my address in account set up. Unfortunately, the version in their reference database (based on my postcode) doesn't quite match the format someone typed it into their billing system. (Billing system: "Flat 1, 2 Foo Street", online is the Scottish way of writing it: "2/1 Foo Street".) So I've become an exception case and they will mail me a PIN. It's 9pm, so that's missed today's post, so won't arrive until Thursday. (If I don't get Hotspot access provisioned before I need it again on Friday, and need to fork out another 10 quid for ad-hoc usage, I will be a Dissatisfied Customer.)
Why not just mail out a PIN for the online site as part of the standard set-up procedure? Surely you want to maximise self-service usage. Indeed, why not offer a fiver in service credit for creating an account and logging in within the first week?
The online sign-up doesn't tell you straight away I've chosen a username that's already taken, and every guess forces me to re-enter my so-called "security questions". I don't have a favourite colour, pet or year, by the way. (I recently visited one site that told me my monther's maiden name was too short at 5 characters. Really. At least they didn't fall for that one.)
So every time I had to go back and guess another user name, I get to enter these again. And every time it shows me the confirmation screen I've magically reverted to "personal" customer from "business", so need to go edit them, re-enter the security questions, and this time it's correct. Only took four attempts.
At least my phone works. Well, I say works. There's two GPRS/3G access points defined, "T-Mo Web" and "T-Zones". It seems that there's no difference. My guess is that there were once different settings for the "walled garden" and "real thing", but they're now one and the same. Still, why not just call it "T-Mobile Internet" and avoid some more support calls.
So only the very scary process of porting my old number to go, once I've used up my pre-paid credit. Looks like I'll be carrying two phones around for a while.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 8:54 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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