Burned by Cingular II: A pattern of poor service, and sales sleaze?
Well, well, well. Remember Fidelity Observer's post in April, complaining about poor service from Cingular ("Customer disservice: Burned by Cingular")? It seems that this is not an isolated incident. A Federal lawsuit claims that millions of former AT&T Wireless customers (such as myself) were the victims of a deliberate effort to force them to upgrade to more expensive plans, but degrading service. Ars Technica has more details.
Is Fidelity Observer surprised by Cingular's alleged sleazy treatment of inherited customers from AT&T Wireless? Not at all. Promises to give us the same service levels we experienced under AT&T are typical corporate P.R. speak, designed to lull customers and regulators into a state of trust and acceptance.
Will the legal activity right the wrongs? Fidelity Observer is doubtful. I think we all know what will happen when a class action lawsuit is filed on our "behalf", and it actually succeeds. A bunch of lawyers walk away with millions, customers get $25 coupons to use for future Cingular services, and Cingular gets to walk away without admitting any wrongdoing.
Caveat Emptor!
Read this post on the Blogger mirror -- Reader comments often appear there that won't show up on this page. You can leave comments on either page, I'll read 'em all!
I made a comment in an earlier post about USAA, "A corporate partnership that's useless for consumers," that has turned out to be wrong. Here's the comment: Read
Fidelity Observer just got a fat mailer from USAA Federal Savings Bank, promising great things. Quickly I discovered that its contents were useless. Read
I had Cingular for about 3 days and cancelled. Seems they could not get our account correct and we were overcharged by a ton. 2 months after cancelling the service, I am still getting bills from them..even though I have gotten assurances from their "customer service" people that the account is closed and I dont owe anything. Stay away from Cingular, people!
David
www.thegoodhuman.com
I spent a few hours a couple of years ago preparing documentation, filling out forms, etc. for the Worldcom stock class action. End of the day I received $11.12 for my efforts. It probably cost more to write the check than it was worth. I threw out the Lucent one that came in the mail a few months after that.
Thanks David and Coach for your comments. I've been through the class action B.S. before as well, and time it takes to hunt down receipts and warranties is not worth the paltry cash -- or even worse -- coupons for the company that wronged customers!
I too echo the comments on Cingular. My wife had been using ATT for about 4 years prior to being switched over with maybe 1 issue. As soon as we got switched over, we had 3 issues in 6 months. We now use TMobile prepaid and love it. We have never had an issue and actually save some money.
Sprint is no better. They erroneously charged me $300 three months ago (which they admitted); however, 4 phone calls later we still owe the money. Each time we've been assured that our balance has been corrected, but it never has been. I feel that cell phone companies offer the very worst service of any industry.
