I was finally reading to give up my unlimited grandfathered data with AT&T and switch to T-Mobile especially since my company gives us a discount but so far it's been nothing but a nightmare! This is truly the most horrible experience I've had with a technology company.
I tried to purchase an iPhone 6 this evening. I went through and qualified for no deposit and only a $99 up front payment of a 64G iPhone 6. I made sure all the details on my account matched my credit card and yet I still got an error. I called up customer service and was on hold forever. After being transferred around a few places, I was told I was approved for up to 10 lines with no deposit and that the website is very busy and I'd just need to keep trying also try a different card (MC vs AMEX) -- ok I thought, the iPhone 6 is very popular and the site is very busy... little did I know that each time I tried, it would do a hard inquiry. Failure after failure nothing told me I was doing a hard credit pull each time I tried to submit my order.
After trying to order numerous times, suddenly I was being told my initial payment would be over $500 for the iPhone and the deposit would be $400!!! Are you freakin' kidding me?? So I started a chat with customer service and after answering numerous questions, I was told to call customer service back. Upon calling I was told that each time the order failed to go through a hard inquiry was being done and now any pre-approval I previously had was replaced by the almost $900 initial outlay now required and that the results stay in the system for 60+ days so I could either reapply then or pay what was being asked and get my deposit back after *only* 12 months... yeah right! You must think I'm crazy if I'm going to pay $900 to switch to T-Mobile and be grateful for it. Of course the customer service person was no help at all in resolving the issue, I demanded to speak to a manager but of course there was no manager, just the promise of a call back in the next 24 hrs.
If you can't have an online ordering system that works properly in this day and age, that gives me very little confidence in a company's ability to manage the rest of their technology.
I'm giving tmo corporate a chance to make this right before I start posting this horror story all over the internet (twitter, facebook, linkedin, personal blog, etc). If this can't be rectified in meaningful way, people need to know to stay away from tmo.
...and did I mention my credit score is now in the toilet? Seriously, what kind of a system does a credit check each time? How hard can it be to store or cache the results of the credit check and reference it over the next 30-90 days???
Ok I'm done.