I posted earlier this month about the lousy customer service I'd experienced from Tracfone and Net10 (they're the same company).
Last week I noticed someone trying to post a positive comment about them in response to my article. I couldn't determine who it was, so I didn't publish the comment, but waited. Sure enough, someone tried to post another comment today. Guess who it was?
Yes, you guessed it - Tracfone and Net10 are headquartered in Florida. Looks like one of their staff did a Google search on the term 'net10 customer service', and probably tried to post a rebuttal on every Web site or blog where he or she found a negative remark. Signing his (?) name as 'Henry', the staffer tried to post this comment:
I really do have to say that I do not agree with this blog post. I have called net10's customer service and encountered only nice people who were very helpful.
I do know that other companies like sprint have not been quite as helpful to my family in prior dealings. My daughter has a droid and we were once put on hold for 45 minutes with a sprint associate.
Nice try, but I don't believe you, 'Henry'. Judging by your location, I suspect you're a Net10 or Tracfone staffer who's not only trying to lie about your identity, but also cast aspersions on another company (Sprint) because another commenter on my original post said good things about their customer service. (Also, I don't see a 'droid' phone - a name which refers to a Motorola model - listed as available on the Sprint Web site. Perhaps you should have checked your facts.) Needless to say, I won't be publishing your comment on my original post.
Readers might wish to take note of this duplicity on the part of Tracfone and Net10, and take it into account when deciding what prepaid cellphone service to use (or to recommend to friends).
Peter
5 comments:
Good catch! This is akin to companies editing wikipedia pages on incidents which reflect badly on they, and getting caught doing it.
Jim
I'm actually amazed at how many companies try this. I've seen similar things on sites where I am admin, and they often dont even try to hide their tracks. Either they believe everyone else is stupid, or they think it's not possible to do an IP check. That really says something when it's a tech company.
Try customer service for Smarttalk(same company). The last time the rep couldn't speak enough english to communicate let alone smart.
Net10 and Tracfone are part of the two dozen or so prepaid telephone companies that are incorporated in Carlos Slim's empire. As Pravda West, AKA New York Times, will be in time.
The service is somewhat better if you speak at least some Spanish, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. I think one problem is the telephone answerers must go through very long channels to fulfill their promises.
The bottom line for me is pretty simple. If you want an emergency telephone cheap, they are OK until they break. Otherwise, you are much better off with a much more expensive "plan."
Stranger
Peter, until I retired last December, I was an engineer who worked to decrease call wait times for Sprint. I no longer have access to the actual wait times, but I can tell you the average is much less than a minute. A few seconds IIRC. Some of Sprint's call centers for Telecommunications Relay have a contractual requirement for a 3 second wait maximum.
There will always be an event---what we call "backhoe in the parking lot..." when some people may have to wait due to some call centers being out of the network due to technical issues. Those occurances, on a yearly basis, can be counted on the fingers of one hand and have fingers left over. Sprint's up-time is the best in the industry and the data is available to all via the FCC. All carriers are required to provide uptime and other information to the FCC on a regular basis.
Frankly, until you mentioned them, I've never heard of Net10. My daughter did, for a while, have a Tracfone but she dumped it when the initial minutes were used. She uses Boost now.
BTW, many of these small companies use the facilities of the "big 3" or Sprint, Verizon and AT&T as carriers. They just rebrand the product.
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