Lessons from T-Mobile’s epic fail
When my electric power came back on but my Verizon FiOS internet connection didn’t, it was time for a mobile hotspot/prepaid wireless internet service. T-Mobile’s 4G Mobile Hotspot/Prepaid Mobile Broadband offering seemed like a good choice. But the experience of setting it up was a nightmare, and a possible instructive nightmare at that.
T-Mobile’s instructions tell you that you need to know the factory defaults for network name and password. That makes sense. They don’t also tell you that you need to know your SIM card number (included), IMEI number (included), or authorization number (not included).
That’s right — you need a number that T-Mobile doesn’t tell you you need. But the story gets a lot worse from there, because it’s almost impossible to get the number from them. I eventually talked with approximately 8 T-Mobile call center associates over the course of the evening before getting successfully connected.
One of the few redeeming features in this story is that T-Mobile call center folks pick up the phone quickly. One of the many non-redeeming ones is that they efficiently give you inaccurate information after they do. The one who finally got me the right answer was a young woman who put me on hold to call an internal resource approximately four times before finally handling the situation correctly.
At one point I found somewhat helpful information by searching on T-Mobile’s website for mobile hotspot activation. However, the same information did not surface on my earlier searches on strings like activate mobile hotspot. Stemming has been a basic feature of search engines since the mid 1990s, but evidently T-Mobile’s technological choices aren’t as current as that. Other inexcusable T-Mobile mistakes include:
- Not providing information about the need for an “activation number” in the product’s paper documentation.
- Taking the buyer to a sign-on screen that doesn’t lead to the call center reps responsible for the product being signed-on for.
- Not providing call center operators with the tools they need to get callers to the right place.
Perhaps Elbonian* contractors were involved.
Elbonia is a fictitious country of outsourcers in Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strip. Elbonian work is not noted for its high quality.
In case you haven’t guessed yet, the missing T-Mobile “activation number” was tantamount to a telephone number, complete with area code. T-Mobile was insisting on assigning a telephone number for a service that had nothing to do with making or receiving telephone calls. While I can believe there was some legitimate database/application design reason for having such inflexibility under the covers, it’s hard to see why T-Mobile didn’t get a composite application tool and hack a front-end that automatically generates the number without call-center intervention.
I did eventually get connected, and in my limited experience with T-Mobile’s Prepaid/Mobile Hotspot 4G “Broadband” offering, I get the impression it has good speed but conventionally flaky WiFi reliability. It may well be a T-Mobile service that is worthy of great success. Edit: That’s not true.* But it’s not going to experience such success as long as T-Mobile idiotically infuriates its users at the relationship start.
*Edit: It turns out that the T-Mobile Mobile Hotspot device has terrible range. We can use it to get online in my office, Linda’s office, or the living room/dining room area, but no 2 of the 3 at once.
My takeaways from this story include:
- Use competent documentation writers.
- Run usability testing on your entire customer-experience processes.
- Test your site search engine for usefulness.
Beyond that, there’s not a single part of this story for which there isn’t a straightforward fix, most of them alluded to above.
If you see anything of your organization in this story, it’s probably time to raise your standards. This is obviously a different kind of failure as, say, the one last year at Chase. Even so, “as awful as T-Mobile” would be a sad state to endure.
Comments
Leave a Reply