Before Christmas I blogged about the issues I’d experienced with EE’s customer service when I tried to migrate my account from T-mobile to EE’s 4G service. In a nutshell instead of upgrading my account they upgraded my wife’s so I had a 3G service in a 4G phone and vice versa.
The good news is that I’m now a happy EE customer and enjoying blistering fast 4G speeds. I’m lucky to live in Leeds, which is one of the first cities to get EE’s 4G coverage. Even more impressively I get a good signal at home despite actually living on the very outskirts of Leeds and am as close to Wakefield city centre as I am to Leeds city centre. But even on the outskirts of Leeds you get a strong 4G signal. In fact, you can even get 4G in parts of Wakefield. Although coverage is sporadic as you can sometimes lose it within Leeds.
My issues with EE weren’t solved via the traditional customer service channels, but rather via EE’s advocate programme. Now obviously this isn’t ideal as what customers actually need is for customer service to do what it says on the tin and provide customer service. My main problem with both EE and T-Mobile’s customer service was that nobody I spoke to wanted to take responsibility for helping me. It also doesn’t help that when you’re ‘upgrading’ the two teams are separate. From a customer perspective EE, T-Mobile and Orange are the same thing and it’s up them to sort out their internal communications procedures. not me.
However, things changed when EE’s PR and advocate team got involved and the issue was very quickly resolved. My dealings with EE’s advocate and customer service team have convinced me that EE does take customer service seriously and is making strenuous efforts to improve it.
My personal top customer service tip for EE would simply be to ‘own the problem’. I’m realistic to know that not every customer service complaint can be solved to the customer’s satisfaction so that’s not necessarily what I was looking for. What I was expecting is that once I’d reported there was a problem then EE would ‘own’ it which means it does the investigating and it comes back to me. Not me chasing it multiple times.
In this case I’m delighted with the outcome as I’ve ended up with a better contract than I’d originally tried to sign-up for. I now have 5Gb of 4G data a month and unlimited calls (unlimited texts as well, but as I use less than 20 a month so it’s not really relevant for me). My wife has a similar 3G package (also on EE rather than the T-mobile one she was on before the botched upgrade). The 4G service is so good that I’m using it for mobile data at home rather than connecting to my home/office wifi. It’s too early to say how much data I actually need each month as my current contract runs from December 20 and my travel patterns over Christmas are totally different than at other times of year.
Finally a big thanks to EE, Andrew Grill and Neville Hobson for helping me to resolve this.
Stuart, glad the EE team got it solved – proves the power of the Advocates program. We’re trying to help other folks out also that are having issues and EE have been slow to respond to – so it’s not just well known influencers such as yourself we are trying to help.
Glad also you agree that the speeds are fast!
Seriously unhappy with EE right now and it’s been going on for months!!!
I have been in dispute with Orange/EE for over 2 months over my phone bill and nothing has changed!
The initial team did nothing for me so it was raised to the Operations Director who was really professional and nice but had a limit to what he could authorise. At the time my bill was, according to the company over GBP600 and he offered me GBP300 off. Had I genuinely been in the wrong I would have taken it but I had been misled by their agent right from the start and I was incurring costs that I had been led to believe would not apply so why should I be paying?
The Operations Director put me in touch with the Executive Office and the woman who has been dealing with the case now says that, although I have used a PAC to port my number over to Vodafone in December 2012 I am “still with Orange” so I am still incurring fee’s on their network! Which now stands at over GBP1500!
I have been paying Vodafone for my current service since then and this woman from Orange ignores everything I am saying about what their agent had done and just keeps repeating that their bill is correct and they will offer me some money off and a repayment plan.
Is this really how Orange/EE works? They are trying to extort this ridiculous amount from me and at the same time intimidate me from using my phone for calls whom I am paying another company for already?
Anyone with any ideas how to deal with this?