Why is my wireless bill $60 higher?
A price shock after switch to T-Mobile has one lesson: pay attention to your bill.
In early September, I wrote about upgrading to a new version of the T-Mobile wireless plan for customers 55 years and older. The new plan would give me 4G hotspot speeds instead of 3G, and I was told that I’d be paying the same price as before.
Well, scratch that. I logged onto my T-Mobile account page on Sunday to discover that my rate had gone up by a whopping $60 a month.
It turns out the agent who had promised no increase made a mistake because we had a third line on our account for one of our adult kids. That line was added under a promotion for just $20 a month, and I’d been told it would not be affected by the switch.
Unfortunately, that was wrong. Because the Magenta 55 plan I switched to couldn’t accommodate a third line, the account was bumped up to the pricier Magenta Plus 55 plan without my approval, and all three lines went to full price. My $110 monthly payment was suddenly $170 a month.
When I saw the higher bill, I was shocked because clearly a promise made to me had not been kept. To make matters worse, I’d received no notification that my monthly rate had increased, or that I’d been placed on a plan I had not requested.
I hopped onto a chat session on T-Mobile’s website and spent some quality time with an agent named Keith. And it was a LOT of quality time.
Our chat session began at 10:10 a.m. and ended at 12:34 p.m.
Eventually, he figured out the problem.
Keith couldn’t give me what I’d signed up for originally, so I requested to be rolled back to my original plan. But that was no longer offered, so he couldn’t just click a few checkboxes on a computer form and revert. He was going to have to kick this to another office that had the power to reinstate my old plan — and he promised he’d make sure this would happen.
Given the situation, I was feeling a little skeptical.
Keith was able to manually remove the additional $60 from my bill for this billing cycle, and assured me I’d get back to my monthly $110 rate.
Keith was not, however, able to explain to me why there’d been no notification. By the way, I ordered the updated plan on Sept. 5, but it was not to take effect until Sept. 28. So T-Mobile’s operatives had 23 days to discover the issue and contact me about it before it kicked in.
I reached out to T-Mobile spokesman Steven Carlson and asked what the carrier’s policy was on letting customers know about changes to their plans. He promised to get back to me.
Shortly afterwards, I got a phone call from Martin Gonzales, a senior specialist on T-Mobile’s executive response team. Like a lot companies, T-Mobile has a group that specializes in dealing with customer service issues that bubble up to the C-suite level. He was calling, he said, from the office of the president.
Gonzales said that I should have received a text message telling me that my plan had changed. He said this incident will serve as a “teachable moment” to improve T-Mobile’s system.
But he also said that TMobile has no formal process for letting a customer know when a service request change cannot be made. Gonzales said it would be up to the individual agent’s initiative, when he or she discovered an error, to reach out to the customer.
Before he hung up, Gonzales also said he’d make sure I’d get back to my old wireless plan, as Keith had promised. After we talked, I checked my account and, sure enough, I’m back to my original plan with its dog-slow 3G tethering.
I don’t believe the “Uncarrier” did something underhanded. This was a mistake made by an agent that was compounded by a lack of communication. T-Mobile generally has very good customer service, but all it takes is one bad experience to change that perception.
And the moral of the story: Check your wireless bill, particularly after you’ve made a change in your service, regardless of who the carrier is. You never know what surprises may await you.