Now, I'm sure those of you in the US, where there's actual cell phone competition, have many an annoying story to share as it is, but up here in Canada you're pretty much limited to Telus, Rogers or Bell as far as picking a phone carrier goes. Yeah, there's also minor players like Virgin, Fido or Koodo (or Sasktel here in Saskatchewan) but generally the Big Three control the network and dictate to everyone else.
Anyway, here's my story about Telus, who I've dealt with for the past four years or so now and have generally been pretty happy with.
For the past two years I've had an LG 490 Fastap from them, which has served me well, but a few months ago, days before the one year warranty was to expire, I started getting a well-known error message whereby sending a text message would freeze up the phone with a sort-of Red Screen of Death and you'd have to pull the battery to fix it. So I brought it into the Telus kiosk in the mall to send it out for warranty repair (we don't actually have any repair facilities here in Saskatoon, because it's fucking SASKATOON) and have the firmware upgraded, which would fix the problem. 6-8 weeks later, the phone comes back, and we pop into the mall to pick it up. The phone is there, it's got my name on it, but when they go to transfer me back from my loaner phone to the proper one, they can't activate it. Thus, I can't have the phone, since it wasn't received according to the computer. "OK," I say quite reasonably given the circumstances, "but you have the phone in your hands. I can clearly see it's a phone which appears to be mine, why can't you just punch in the magic numbers and let me go enjoy my New York Fries over at the food court?" Well, long story short, they can't just do that because the repair facility's computer is showing that mine was never sent out, and so the helpful clerk sends an e-mail to them asking, basically, WTF? Longer story shorter, two hours and several phone calls to unhelpful repair place later, someone finally decides to check the damn serial number of the phone received in my name, and lo and behold it's got someone else's stuff on it. Now, it's a damn good thing I don't keep sensitive private info on my cell phone because I'd be pretty fucking pissed that everything was now in the hands of some other poor sucker with the same phone, but this was annoying enough as it is. Their offer to make good: They'll send me an identical new phone. Refurbished, of course. Not even an offer to upgrade the phone to something new for, you know, LOSING MY FUCKING PHONE.
Fine. Skip ahead another six months to now, and I've got six months left on my contract. Telus has a "Free Phone Promise" where they basically promise to upgrade your phone six months before the contract is to expire (so as to keep you on the hook), and when talking to a repair tech earlier in the month for an unrelated matter he had excitedly noted that I was due for my upgraded phone on the 20th. Well, hallelujah, now I can get an MP3 phone or something less likely to implode. So yesterday, the 19th, I go into the Telus kiosk because I have a day off and we're at the mall anyway (curse you, New York Fries!) and ask if I can receive my new free phone early, what with it only being 24 hours removed from the upgrade date anyway. The computer says no, but the guy says we can call Client Care and ask them if they'll bump it up, which seems like a reasonable request since I've taken the time out of my day to attempt to bring them business. Now, they also have a promise regarding phone wait times, which basically says that if you wait more than 5 minutes on hold for someone, they'll give you the equivalent amount of airtime on your account and they brag that 80% of calls are answered in 20 seconds or less. My wait time? 20 minutes, standing on hold in the mall kiosk. Finally I get a rep, who as usual is not fluent in the English language, and I explain patiently that I'm standing here at the kiosk, ready to sign a new contract if they'll bump up my Free Phone Promise 24 hours, and she notes there's been an offer on my account for $200 off a data device (Blackberry / Palm whatever) that's been there for a while, and wouldn't I like to use that? I note that, no I wouldn't because a data device runs $500 or more and even with $200 off that price on a three-year contract that I wouldn't want anyway, that's hardly a free phone. So she talks to her supervisor, and they put $150 off a regular phone, again on a three-year contract. And again I note, I don't want a three-year contract and that's not a free phone either. Now she's getting frustrated with me and starts questioning if there's some phone in particular I'm looking for and I'm trying to explain to her that how it works is Telus is supposed to present ME with a list of phones which I can acquire for free on my choice of contract terms, not the other way around, but then I just got sick of the whole conversation and hung up after wasting a half an hour of my day trying to convince them to take my money and apparently failing miserably. So now apparently I have to wait until they magically auto-generate the offer of a free phone sometime today, because the always-helpful real person who helped me at the kiosk noted (diplomatically, of course) that Telus head office was being real pricks about sticking strictly to the "no offers before the due date, no exceptions" policy lately and basically I just had to wait until they decided to come down from the golden tower and offer me a new phone on their terms.
Lemme tell ya, Virgin Mobile is looking pretty damn good right about now. And all the customer service reps that I've dealt with in my time when I handled cell phone sales actually spoke English, so that's a plus too.
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