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This morning, I had perfectly normal coverage for voice, messaging and data on my phone using the Monthly 4G plan on T-Mobile. At 8:30am PDT, my signal completely disappeared. I rebooted my phone several times thinking that perhaps it was a hiccup on my end, but this did nothing.________________________
So I called the Contact Us number listed on T-Mobile's site after searching all the pages for a place to report an outage. I wanted someone to confirm for me that there was an issue in my area so I didn't have to keep worrying that something was wrong with my phone. The first machine that answered hung up on me because I didn't give it an account number. The second time I called back, I just said Customer Service over and over and finally got a human being.
The VERY FIRST THING I asked was if they could check to see if there was an outage in my area. I had to give them my phone number and go through a ton of troubleshooting of my phone before they said there wasn't a problem in my area. At some point they realized, even though they were looking at my account the entire time, that I was on the Monthly 4G plan and transferred me. The second person made me go through all the same loops to include taking out my sim chip, always assuming that there was something wrong with my phone rather than with the network. I explained to them that I had perfectly normal coverage, and then I just didn't, and I hadn't changed anything on my phone...but they still did not seem to believe that it could be a network issue on their end. I was then transferred to technical support and went through the same troubleshooting all over again, to included repeating the removal of my SIM chip. While talking to this last individual, he decided to file a report with engineering and this is when it was FINALLY discovered that there was a trouble ticket already submitted for my area and that there was an outage that was affecting all TMobile customers in my area. I do not know why, when I asked all three individuals repeatedly if this was a network outage, none of them saw this ticket but I spent 44 minutes on the phone, rebooting, removing sim cards and batteries and checking settings on my own phone that I could have been doing other things if someone had just been able to check the trouble tickets from the start.
I do not know how the ins and outs of your system work, and what would have kept any of them from seeing this trouble ticket from the beginning, but there has got to be a better way to let customers report an outage in the area (or even just look up that there is an outage). If I had been able to check the website to see a notice or even had a form to report the outage with a possible message coming back saying that they were already aware of this problem, I would have saved not only 44 minutes of my own time but also that of three of your own customer service reps.
It really shouldn't be this hard. I did request the number of this particular trouble ticket so that if I do call back (if it isn't restored in 72 hours), I will have a reference point to start with. I also was transferred back to the Monthy 4G people so that if I do end up without service for three days or more, I can get my account credited since I am paying for 30 days of service at a time.
Eight Years Ago on In My Words...Customer Service Miracle
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