The airtime minutes on my TracFone expired yesterday. I will not be adding any more airtime. Ever.
I have some plans in store for my TracFone later this week, so if you like watching video of things getting destroyed you may want to come back and check it out.
Let me take this opportunity to summarize why I think TracFone is lousy service and should be avoided like the plague:
I had not talked about this before, but in retrospect, the procedure for adding airtime to a TracFone is a real pain.
If you want to do it without having to talk to one of their customer service reps (an experience that can be compared to a visit to the 7th level of customer service Hell), you can use their web site to purchase airtime. When you have made your purchase you are presented with a series of codes that must be entered in using the buttons on the phone’s keypad.
Each code is probably about 16 or so numbers and you have to enter at least 4 of these codes at least — maybe as many as 6 but it’s been a while so I can’t be remember exactly. Anyway, it’s a lot of tapping on the keypad and it is a pain in the rear if you buy your airtime in small blocks and have to keep adding more every couple of months.
I don’t recommend buying large blocks of TracFone airtime for two reasons. The first of which I talked about in this post a while back, and the second is that if you buy a whole bunch of airtime, like a year’s worth, and come to the same conclusion that I did that TracFone sucks, you will be stuck with it until the airtime expiration date, unless you just want to blow it off and get new phone and let the TracFone airtime be wasted.
TracFone customer service is terrible. Every time I called, the phone connection was terrible with lots of static and other noise on the line. Not to mention it sounds like there are about a thousand other people on the line with you since you can hear all the other customer service reps in the background talking to other unfortunate TracFone customers.
The customer service reps are clueless and are constantly putting you on hold each time you ask them any question that is more difficult than “What’s your name?”
Many of them also have terrible English speaking skills and it is nearly impossible to to communicate with them.
Apparently, they are also trained to apologize every 10 seconds or so. I guess they think that will make everything better, but in my experience, numerous apologies did not seem to help solve the problem I was having. Imagine that!
The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the text message SPAM TracFone was sending to my phone constantly.
I normally use my phone only when I leave the house. I turn it on and throw it on the seat next to me in the car. The first time I received text message spam from TracFone I wasn’t sure what had happened. I was driving down the road and my phone emitted a rather loud single “beep.”
At first I thought the battery was dying or something else had gone wrong with it. I picked it up, only to find a text message on the screen. Who the heck would be sending me a text message? It soon became clear. It was TracFone text message SPAM. “Get FREE minutes for your phone…” or some other garbage.
I started getting these things about once every other time I turned the damn thing on and it was annoying. If you hate SPAM as much as I do, you’ll know what I mean.
After a few of these text message SPAM messages I decided enough was enough. I e-mailed TracFone and told them I wanted them to stop sending text message promotions to my phone. They promised it would stop. And it did. For a while.
About a month or two later it started up again. It was then I decided that I was done with TracFone and would not purchase any more airtime from those idiots again.
When we first got a TracFone, I thought it was a nifty idea. I liked the idea of adding airtime through their website and not having to call someone. I love doing business on the web and I hate doing business on the phone. If I can avoid talking to some customer service drone and order something on the web or find an answer to a problem on the web, I am very happy to do so.
I had read the bad reviews about TracFone customer service, but I figured I’d never have to actually call their customer service line. I could activate the phone and buy all the airtime right on the web! I’m a pretty tech savvy guy so I figured I could figure out most of what I needed to know on my own.
I was wrong. Problems with TracFone service, I discovered, are not uncommon. Trust me, if you are a TracFone customer, the day will come when you have to dial that customer service number. It’s inevitable and you’ll just have to accept it. And then you will find out just how lousy their service can be.
By the way, I got a bit curious about TracFone a few weeks ago and decided to do a little research. I was wondering about their customer service and why my phone connections were always terrible and why I never, ever spoke to anyone there who was a native English speaker.
Turns out that TracFone is a foreign company (from a U.S. perspective anyway!) and it is headquartered down in South America somewhere. So, if you are one of those “Buy American” types, there is another reason for you to avoid TracFone.
[tags]tracfone, customer service, prepaid wireless[/tags]
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