Sit back and listen to a tale that will chill your heart, The Horror of Customer Service. You might remember that I cracked the screen of my old phone and as it cost almost as much to fix as to get a new phone, I opted for the latter. I jumped from a Galaxy 10 to a Galaxy 21 FE. I bought it directly from Boost Mobile to make things as easy as possible (foreshadowing). When I got it, I realized that I shouldn’t use it until I got a case for it. I don’t want to break it right off the bat. The new heavy duty case and screen protectors came on Wednesday. I then migrated all my data from my old phone to the new one. Samsung does a great job of making that easy with an app. It took hours and hours but when it was one the new phone was set up just like the old one. It had my same wallpaper and ringtones. I didn’t even have to retrain the voice recognition, Google kept that in the cloud. I just had to teach the new phone my face and fingerprints. When it was done, I was delighted. I tried everything but making a call. I got a text from someone excusing a butt dial that I didn’t hear but figured I just missed it. Nope. The phone was not activated. I tried to figure out how to do that. The instructions that came with the phone didn’t tell you that. I went to the website, and it told me that I had to switch to the new website. I went to the new website, but it didn’t have the easy link to activate a phone. It just gave instructions for changing over from another carrier. I called the customer support number from my old phone which of course still worked. It took a while for rep and me to get on the same page. The entire trick was not using the SIM card that came with the new phone but just using the card from my old one. That was easy. By this time, it was Saturday morning. I made a call to a friend to make plans. We were supposed to see each other this week but I never got around to calling her. We made plans for next weekend. A little while later I got my first call from another friend. The phone was no longer a virgin! Huzzah. You might be wondering where is the horror? It’s yet to come.
My phone made the cricket noise I use as an alert. I did have to change that setting to match the old phone. The alert said that I needed to activate my phone, or I wouldn’t be able to do everything with it. That seemed odd as I could make and receive calls and texts and use the internet. What couldn’t I do? Whatever it was I didn’t like hearing the alert. I clicked on it and up popped a button saying to press it to activate the phone. I did. It had me log in. I did. Then it told me that I needed to go to the new website. The app built into the phone sent me to the wrong one. Boost is still in the process of moving from boostmobile.com to my.boost.com. I go to the new site and I’m back to where I was before. I tried ignoring it, but it kept sending me the notifications. I heard the crickets every half an hour. I called customer support again. When I called to find out how to get the phone activated, I discovered that along with the new website came a new phone number. If you call the wrong one, they can’t help you. You have to call again and go to the back of the queue. We are talking 20-minute waits.
From here in I’ll just repost the email I sent to Boost.
I have wasted hours the last few days talking to customer service agents that don’t know what they are doing. They seem to have a list of things to ask and won’t stray from the script even after being told I’ve tried these things multiple times. It took five calls to find out that my problem was at your end not mine.
My first issue was not knowing how to activate the phone which i purchased from you. This is how the conversation started with the first agent.
Me: Hi, I’m already a boost mobile customer that bought a new phone. How do I activate it?
Agent: “I understand you are switching providers from another service to Boost Mobile. The exact opposite of what I said. I suspect that many of the agents I talked to were not fluent in English.
After some discussion the second agent told me to not use the sim card that came with the phone but the one from my old phone. That should be in the instructions when you get the phone.
I did that and the phone activated. Great. I almost immediately got a notification that I have to activate the phone. I clicked on the button on the notice. It asked if I wanted transfer my account from the old phone to the new. I said yes. It then asked me for my phone number and pin. When I provided it, it told me that I have to log into the new website by clicking on a link. I did. I logged in. There was nothing about activating the phone. Just info on how to activate a phone from another provider.
The phone was working fine. Made and received calls but repeatedly got notifications that I have to activate the phone, so I called customer service to fix that.
The first agent barely spoke English and would make no effort to be understood. He asked for the “mumblemumblemumble” number. It sounded like it was a string of letters but i couldn’t make out which ones. I asked him to repeat it one letter at a time. He just mumbled again. This happened over and over again. I kept looking through the Setting and finally found something that I thought might be what I wanted. It was the IMEI which I sounded out one letter at a time. It was what he wanted but then found out that the entire reason he was asking was to find if the phone was compatible with Boost. I started by telling him I bought the phone from Boost. He then discovered that my email address was lost when they migrated my account over to the new website. He told me to change it on my account, but it can’t be changed from my end, so he did it. I had to spell out my email address seven times before he got it right. He said that would fix the issue. It didn’t. He then said it might take a few hours, so I waited more than a few and tried again.
The person I talked to tried to start from scratch, just as the last one did. She wanted the IMEI number and the Sim card number. I gave them after she didn’t seem to understand that I’ve been through that already. He suggested that i turn the phone off for a minute and then turn it back on. That didn’t work.
This went on so many times that I lost track of each call. i was repeatedly told to log into the website and they kept assuming I was logged into the wrong website, the old one.
I went through all this with the last agent, and she kept thinking that my problem was with logging into the website. i told her I was logged in. it said, “Welcome Gordon.” Her response was “put in your phone number and password.” I told think she ever understood what the problem was.
I asked to speak to her superior. I had to wait but finally talked to him and he knew exactly what was wrong as many people are having the same issue and that the problem was on their end. Why weren’t the customer service people informed of this? I wasted literally hours on a problem that could not be resolved. He said that they put me at the top of the queue and an engineer would fix it as soon as possible though it might take more than 24 hours. I can accept that. I can’t accept not understanding what my problem is and repeatedly assuming it was something that I explicitly said was not the problem. Your customer service reps need serious retraining, and you need to make it clear how to activate a new phone. My phone came with a SIM card and the instructions said to use it. Why would i think to use my old card without instruction?
I have always been happy with Boost. I love my Samsung Galaxy, but this was a nightmare. It took so much of my weekend. Not all of it though I didn’t leave the house. I spent New Year’s Eve watching the Knicks win and writing Gord’s Gold. My holiday dinner was poutine. I can’t complain about that. I did not watch the ball drop or any New Year’s Eve TV. When the Knick game was over, I listened to the WQXR classical countdown. I always listen to that if I’m home on NYE. After the Knick game I heard Beethoven’s 7th, Dvorak’s Symphony from the New World. The countdown finished as it has every year but one that I listened to with Beethoven’s glorious 9th Symphony, the greatest work of art, in any medium, ever created. That is not subject to debate. You might have a different opinion, but if so, you are wrong. This is absolute objective truth.
This morning I recorded the Gord’s Gold and had a great breakfast of pepper bacon and eggs on naan. Since then, I’ve taken care of a lot of Gord’s Gold accounting and listened to WFUV. John Platt played his top ten songs. Some of my favorites were in there. As for my phone, I figured out how to have it stop annoying me with notifications that I need to activate it. I turned of notifications for the app that was telling me that! I now have peace. Of course, I won’t know if they ever fix the issue.
Wise Madness 