Saturday, May 21, 2011

A rare creature was found today. Excellent customer service!!

     I can officially say I have no luck with wireless phones. Over the past three years I have had to either swap or replace my phone seven times. A majority of those exchanges were due to the quality on the Blackberry Storm 1. That phone was possibly the most problematic phone I have ever had. I wasn't alone on the opinion. The internets was riddled with complaints and even RIM felt it was bad enough to release a Storm 2 less than a year later. It's like the said the hell with this piece of crap, just make a whole new version. The other swaps were on my Droid Incredible and now my Thunderbolt.

     The Thunderbolt was defective since day one. The device was slow and quite warm when charging or surfing the web. The sales person at the store assured me it was normal for the phone to be warm when using or charging The sales person informed me there was software that was being worked on by Verizon would cure the issue. I pointed out that the phone proximity sensor never turns the phone off when the phone was near my face and again was told the update would fix that. I personally never heard of any phone having to get an update to have it work properly when making phone calls but what do I know. It's new tech so I guess it could happen. Well, the update came out a couple of weeks ago and I finally had it sent to the phone. Needless to say, the proximity issue did not get resolved. Big surprise there. The Thunderbolt being "warm" when charging or using to surf the web was not cleared at all. In fact, the Thuderbolt gets so hot charging I can't hold it and the battery doesn't take a full charge. I have had it charge over night to only get a max charge of 83%. Let's throw on the the 4G network I am currently nestled dead smack in the middle of now goes from 4G to 1X to 3G with no explanation. I would buy the change if I was traveling in the area but I shouldn't jump networks with the phone sitting on my desk. That was the last straw and alas I made the Russian Roulette call into customer service.

     I can't say I have always had bad experiences calling into the customer service. I have had some really excellent reps in the past that did care about what was happening and tried to do what they could. It is the handcuffs the company puts on the reps that drives me up the wall. I'm sure most of the tech agents can tell in the first few minutes if the phone is bad or not. Unfortunately, they still have to walk through this whole process before the system will allow an exchange or repair.

     The two agents I did deal with today were the first two I have had that went outside the box. I'm leaving names out because I do not want them to get into any trouble for breaking protocol. The first rep listened and withing the first 5 minutes, knew there was an issue that required this phone to be exchanged. No "Can you do this or do that?" foolishness. Just a quick diagnosis and off to the next level of tech to process. When I did get to the next rep, he did have me do a reset, which I expected. I was already in the process of it so we talked about some of the known issues with the phone. He is a Thunderbolt user and experienced some of my problems. Once the phone was live, we did the proverbial test call and confirmed the proximity sensor was junk and now has a new phone coming my way.

     Most of you will say the agents did what they were suppose to do. Why rave about getting an expected level of service? I'm raving because I finished a technical phone call under 10 minutes and did not have to fight to get it done. Both reps were more focused on getting me my resolution than having me go through the ever monotonous step by step trouble shooting process. A rare breed of agent that makes a judgment call in a company the penalizes its people for doing so. I say kudos to them for helping a customer and making my call an enjoyable one. I should have my new phone by next week so lets see if this one will do what it should. If not, I'm sure I'll be complaining by Tuesday if its not here.

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