It’s a difficult time to be a T-Mobile customer or employee

Pricing updates users have deemed unfair

Image credit — The New York Times

The biggest controversy in recent days is the fact that T-Mobile has increased costs of price locked plans being used by legacy customers. These increases represent an additional $5 to a line which may not seem like much but it’s definitely something that adds up over time.

Customers have started threatening to leave T-Mobile for an alternative because they were under the impression that their plans would cost the same forever. These people are also at their wits’ end and taking out their frustrations on the employees at corporate and authorized retailer stores for T-Mobile.In turn T-Mobile employees have asked for kindness from customers and reminded them that they had nothing to do with this directly. Employees say that they will try their best to help customers navigate these new updates but that they shouldn’t be blamed for the price hikes.

Some T-Mobile users, on the other hand, are responding by talking about instances where a customer representative was less than helpful. Customers on social media say that they have been wronged and that they don’t care who’s to blame. Others bring up T-Mobile’s yearly earnings to prove that there was no need for the price changes and that they won’t back down.

T-Mobile’s peace offering

Image credit — Bloomberg

After the tidal wave of backlash online T-Mobile tried to make it up to affected customers by offering a new promotion. For a $10 signing fee customers are entitled to a new free T-Mobile line. The only catch seems to be that users will be locked into a contract for the foreseeable future.

This promotion — though positively received by many — has also been criticized. While some users are happy to stick around with T-Mobile a while longer, others say that the company should have made an existing line free. In their words T-Mobile customers don’t benefit from getting yet another line.

It also doesn’t help that the promotion ran into a little misunderstanding: T-Mobile users lost free lines when they signed up for the new one. This ultimately turned out to not really be a problem but the initial texts about being un-enrolled from existing free lines surely made some customers’ hearts sink.

A difficult time for T-Mobile

The entire ordeal has, in my opinion, led to some unpleasant days of being a T-Mobile customer or employee. As an employee you’re forced to ask customers to use the T-Life app. In response customers walk out of T-Mobile stores or get very frustrated with you.On the other hand, as a T-Mobile customer, you’ve just seen your price locked plan go up in cost. You’re also being told to use an app that is still broken — it also increased the confusion about the lost free lines fiasco mentioned above — and employees don’t seem to have answers for you.

This is all leading to more and more hostile confrontations between T-Mobile customers and employees in the coming weeks I’m afraid. T-Mobile really needs to sort this out as soon as possible before too many customers and employees get burnt out.