If you have read much more if this blog, you’ll know that I was a TracFone customer who was completely dissatisfied with their service.
We were a 3-TracFone family. Originally, we bought one for my son. Seeing how cheap it was compared to our standard cell phone plan with U.S. Cellular, we ditched the U.S. Cellular service and got TracFones for both my wife and myself as well. If you don’t know the rest of that story, just read my other TracFone entries here.
As I mentioned yesterday, my TracFone airtime expired and my TracFone promptly stopped working.
My son’s airtime ran out about a month ago and since he’s back in school and not going back and forth to work for a few months, it was a good time to ditch his TracFone and just get a new one from another company in the spring.
I was a bit more work to convince my wife to dump her TracFone, since as she put it, “I haven’t had any trouble with it.”
Well, that’s because I am the one that programmed the new airtime into all the phones in the house and the only one who had the “pleasure” of calling TracFone customer service to deal with whatever problems we were having with the phones.
When I told her that I was finished dealing with TracFone in any capacity, and that she would have to add her own airtime and take care of all the issues involving her own phone, she softened her position and agreed to a new phone if it was as inexpensive as TracFone.
I was very happy to hear that. We would now be 100% TracFone-free and I would not have to give them another dime. Their lousy service cost them three phones in this household.
So begins the search for new prepaid wireless service for my wife. I am going to wait a while before I get a new one, since I don’t travel as much as she does.
Naturally, I began my search on the internet. Since we live in a rather out-of-the-way location here, we don’t have as much choice when it comes to wireless service. U.S. Cellular pretty much owns all the service in our area, so the provider we select has to play well with their sites. That left out a lot of the most popular wireless companies.
Cingular looked like it might work, but the way their plans are described on their site, did not give me confidence and was a little difficult to understand. One thing good about the TracFone service was that you simply buy your airtime and that was it. You did not face any more charges until your airtime expiration date arrived or you used up all of your airtime before the expiration date and needed to buy more. No surprises with that. You knew what you were spending.
I found the wording on the Cingular site confusing. I won’t go so far as to say “deceptive,” but I will say they could do a hell of a lot better explaining how the plans work.
Here’s basically how they presented the information on their plans. It was a certain dollar amount for a certain period of time. For example, it was $15 for 30 days of airtime. On the same page, a little above that, it said the plan was 25 cents per minute. Huh? Which is it?
Well, finding no clear and detailed explanation of the plan other than that, I have to presume that they are charging you $15 just to have the phone able to function for 30 days. Beyond that, I guess they expect you to pay the 25 cents a minute when you actually do use the phone. That’s not much of a deal, so I decided it was not going to be Cingular.
I decided to dig around a bit more and came across Beyond Wireless that also looks like it will work in my area. I browsed around their site and fortunately, their plan seems like a much better deal. It clearly states the minutes and the airtime expiration date you get with each purchase.
For example, for $5 you get 36 minutes and 15 days. See that, Cingular? That’s no so difficult is it?
The rates also look quite favorable when compared to TracFone. Even a little better I think.
One thing I noticed while reading the FAQ on the Beyond Wireless site is that it is sometimes possible to keep your old phone and move it to their network. Maybe I would not have to retire the TracFone phones at all. It’s a long shot since the TracFones seem like they are highly customized to work with that service.
Since the FAQ said to call to see if your old phone can be used with the Beyond Wireless service, I figured I would give them a call and ask. That’s were things get a bit ugly.
I have been on the phone listening to their “on hold” music now for over an hour. Since I have a headset and don’t have to hold the phone up to my ear and I can also just sit here and do my normal work with the headset on, it is not as much of a hassle a it would be for a lot of other people to be on hold this long.
I must say that I am not impressed with Beyond Wireless so far. Apparently, they are too cheap or greedy (or both) to hire enough customer service people to handle the incoming calls in a reasonable amount of time. Being on hold for over an hour is in now way acceptable customer service by any stretch of the imagination.
It’s amusing to hear the little recorded voices that cut into the music every few minutes to let me know that they “sincerely appreciate my patience and that they look forward to talking with me soon” also “they’ll be right back with me.” Well, after an hour, that’s a bit hard to believe!
If they really cared about talking to me and the many other people that must be on hold as well, they would spend a few more bucks and hire some more people to answer the damn phone. Guess that might cut a bit too far into the massive profits that the top execs of the company are enjoying. Screw customer service. it’s all about the money.
In a normal world, I would simply hang up and cross Beyond Wireless off my list. However, in a world with consistent crappy customer service almost wherever you go, you are left with the choosing the lesser of two evils. The best of the worst, so to speak.
If I eventually get a reasonably competent customer service rep who speaks good English on a phone line that is not full of noise and the voices of 1000 other customer service people in the background, I will have to consider it a “win” compared to TracFone.
What a sad state customer service is in these days. Now if I we do end up with a Beyond Wireless phone and they start sending text message SPAM to it constantly, I might just start shopping for tin cans and a lot of string!
Update: After an hour and 45 minutes on hold with Beyond Wireless, I decided that the situation was beyond reasonable and I hung up. I may try e-mailing them, but with no other choices available that I know if for prepaid wireless in our area, I may have to give them a try anyway.
[tags]prepaid wireless, tracfone, cingular, beyond wireless[/tags]
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