Cell phone carriers restricting customer phone options?

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 23, 2009 . 5:56PM

Luckily for T-mobile, I’m not a customer, or I would take the 45 minutes it would likely take me to get through to their customer service and give them an earful after reading an article on consumerist.com. Apparently, as consumers, we are no longer allowed to buy our phones where we choose and we must buy them from the carrier itself or risk some kind of ominous unknown threat. I’m not sure what the threat is, but Meg Marco notes:

When the salesperson was ringing me up, she started trying to set up the phone. I told her not to worry about it because I wasn’t going to be using it as a pre-paid phone, but I was going to put my own SIM card in there. She got really quiet and sad that she would “have to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

You’re going to pretend you didn’t hear that? Or what? Are you going to terminate your contract with me? At what cost? Unless you find a way to make phones indestructible, phones are going to break and things are going to happen and unless replacement policies get better, people are going to say “screw your new phones, I’m getting a used one until my 2 years is up.”

Recently, I did this when my LG Voyager just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There was nothing wrong with it other than I hated the phone. It wasn’t intuitive and the excessive amount of money I would need to pay for each and every application made me realize that it was just another cash cow for my phone carrier. I reluctantly went back to the blackberry, buttcalls and all. Frankly, I’ve never been happier in my life. The little Pink Pearl telephone I got off of craigslist is smaller than most blackberries and I feel bad that I didn’t listen to my friend, Clay, when he told me years ago that the pearl was the way to go. For having large man hands, my palms are surprisingly small and this is a nice fit for me.

However, if Verizon had suddenly made some snide comment that I could not use the pearl, which is one of their recognized phones or that they “hadn’t heard that I got it off of craigslist” I would have been inclined to shoot fire out of my mouth at the rep because a phone carrier may carry my service, but I’m not required to keep the same phone I bought with the plan and, if I were, I’d go elsewhere. If I wanted to buy a pay by the minute phone to stick a Sim card in (for carriers that use them), I should be able to do so with a rep that cheerfully offers to help me because this is like any other business and a paying customer is a paying customer.

Have these people never heard about “giving ‘em the pickle?” Giving ‘em the pickle is a customer service technique which means going above and beyond the call of duty to gain and keep customers. It’s explained on the linked website, but the key is that if you can make your customers happy by giving them pickles for their sandwiches, why would you deny them something so small? T-mobile, you were still making money from this? Why would you deny this person something so small or encourage your reps to make others feel bad based on what they afford to get by? Hopefully, someone out there is rethinking this policy because it seems like losing customers over pre-paid cells is a silly policy.