I have not ranted about the ineptitude of companies for a while, but this time I have to go back to it. Most of the people who follow me on Twitter are probably already fully aware of what’s going on, so if you want to skip on reading this, feel free.
When I moved to Ireland in 2013, I evaluated quickly the mobile providers available and decided to become a customer of Three Ireland. I was already a customer of Three back in Italy, and they had the same offer here than they had there, which involved the ability to be “Three like at home”, roaming on foreign Three networks for free, using the same allowance of calls and data that you have on your own country. Since my expectation was to go home more often than I actually did, roaming to Three Italy sounded like a good deal.
Fast forward four years, and I ended up having to give up and moved to a new provider altogether. This all precipitated since Three Ireland took effectively four months to fix up my account so I could actually use it, but let’s take one step at a time.
Back in January this year, my Tesco credit card got used fraudulently. Given I have been using Revolut for most of my later trips to the States, I can narrow down where my card was skimmed as one of three places, but it looks like the MIT Coop store is the most likely culprit. This is a different story, and luckily Tesco Bank managed to catch the activity right away, cancelled my card and issued me a new one. This is something I talked about previously.
The main problem was migrating whatever was still attached to that card onto a different one. I managed to convert most of my automated debits onto my Ulster Bank MasterCard (except Vodafone Italy, that’s a longer story), but then I hit a snag. My Three Ireland account was set up to auto-top-up from my Tesco Bank card €20 every month. This was enough to enable the “All you can eat data” offer, which gave me virtually unlimited data in Ireland, UK, Italy, and a few other countries. Unfortunately when I went to try editing my card, their management webapp (My3) started throwing errors at me.
Or rather, not even throwing errors. Whenever I would go to list my payment cards to remove the now-cancelled card, it would send me back to the service’s homepage. So I called them, and I’ll remind you this is January, to ask if they could look into it, and advised I won’t be able to take call because I was about to leave for the USA.
The problem was clearly not solved when I got back to Ireland, and I called them again, told me I would be contacted back from their tech support and they will give me an update. They called me, of course always at awkward times, and the first thing they asked me was for a screenshot of the error I was shown, except I was shown no error. So they had to go back and forth a couple of times with them, both on the phone and over Twitter (both publicly and over direct messages).
At some point during this exchange they asked me for my password. Now, I use LastPass so the password is not actually sensitive information by itself, but you would expect that they would have built something in place where they can act as one of their customers, for debugging purposes, or at least be able to override the password, and just ask me to change it afterwards. Since the second auto-top-up failed and required me to make a manual payment, I decided to give up, and send them screenshot of both the loading page and the following landing page, and send it to them as requested.
Aside note here: the reason why these auto-top-up are important, is that without these, you get charged for every megabyte you use. And you don’t get any notification that your all-you-can-eat expired, you only get a notification after you spent between €5 and €10 in data, as that’s what law requires. So if the auto-top-up failed, you end up just using your credit. Since I used to spend the credit on Google Play instead (particularly to pay for Google Play Music All Access — my, what a mouthful!), this was not cool.
By end of March, when the third auto-top-up failed, and I ended up wasting €15 for not noticing it. I called them again, and I managed to speak to the only person in this whole ordeal who actually treated me decently. She found the ticket closed because they did not receive my screenshot, so she asked me to send them directly to her address and she attached them to the ticket herself. This reopened the ticket, but turned out not to help.
At this point I’ve also topped up the €130 that were required to request an unlock code for my Sony Xperia XA phone, so I decide to request that in parallel while I fight with trying to be able to configure my payment cards. Since the phone is Sony, the unlock code comes directly from them and Three advises is going to take up to 21 working days. When I send the request, I get an email back telling me the unlock request was not successful, and to contact the customer support. Since I was already bothering them on Twitter, I do so there, and they reassure me that they took care of it and sent the request through.
Also, this time I give up and give them my password, too. Which became even funnier, because as I was dictating it to them I go to “ampersand” and they reply “No that’s impossible, it’s not a valid character for the password!” — as it happens it is indeed not a valid character, now. When I set my password it was valid, but now it is not. I found out after they fixed the problem, because of course by then I wanted to change my password, and LastPass generated another one with the & character.
It took another month for them to finally figure out the problem, and another three or four requests for screenshots, despite them knowing my password. And a couple of times asking me to confirm my email address, despite it already being in the system and all. But at least that part got fixed.
Now remember the unlock code request above? 21 working days in most cases mean around a month. So a month after my unlock code request I call them, and they inform me that the 21 working days would expire the next day, a Friday. The reason is to be found in Easter and bank holidays being present, reducing the number of working days in the month. Fair enough, I still ask them what’s going to happen if the 21 days promise is breached, and the guy on the phone denies it is even possible. Of course the day after I got to chat with them again, and they realize that there was no update whatsoever and there should have been at least one.
They decide to request an urgent unlock, since on the Thursday I would be leaving for China, and they promise me the unlock code would be there by Monday. Goes without saying it didn’t work. When I called on Monday they told me that only Sony can provide the unlock, and since it was a long weekend they were not going to answer until at least the day after (May 1st was bank holiday, too). At this point I was pissed and asked to speak with a manager.
Unfortunately the person at the phone was not actually human, but rather was replaced by one of those call center scripts kind of drone and not only kept telling me that they had nothing personal against me, which I did not care if they did, to be honest, but refused to redirect me to a manager when I pointed out that this was ludicrous after fighting four months to get the other problem solved. They kept saying that since the ticket is closed, there was nothing they could talk to me about. They also insisted that since the unlock code hasn’t arrived they couldn’t even offer me a trade-in with an unlocked phone, as that is only available if the unlock code fails to work.
I ended up having to buy myself a new phone, because I could not risk going to China with a locked phone again. Which turned out to be an interesting experience as it looks like in Ireland, the only places to buy unlocked phones are either corner shops selling Chinese phones, or Argos. I ended up buying an Xperia X from Argos, and I’m very happy of the result, although I did not intend to spend that money. But that’s a story for another day, too. Of course the unlock code arrived the day after I bought my new phone, or should I say the day after I gave up on Three Ireland, and moved to Tesco Mobile.
Because at that point, the drone got me so angry that I decided to just spend all of my credit (minus €20 because I hit the usage limit) buying movies and books on Google Play, and when I picked up the phone on Tuesday, I also picked up a SIM for Tesco Mobile. I found out that MNP in Ireland takes less than an hour and just involves a couple of confirmation codes, rather than having to speak with people and fill in forms. And I’m indeed happy on Tesco Mobile right now.
Why am I so riled up? Because I think Three Ireland lost a big opportunity to keep a customer, the moment when I expressed my dissatisfaction with the service and with the lack of unlock code. They could have offered me a trade-in of the current phone. They could have given me the credit I spent because of their issue back. They could have even offered me a new, any new phone, locked to their network, to make it harder for me to leave them. Instead they went the road of saying that since the problem has been solved at all, there was never any problem.
I found this particularly stupid particularly compared to the way Virgin Media and Sky Ireland seem to have it down to practice: when I called Sky to ask them if they had any better offer than Virgin, back when I used TV service, they told me they couldn’t do better broadband, but they would offer me a lower price on the TV package so that I could unbundle it from Virgin. When I called Virgin to remove the TV package (because at the time they were going to increase the monthly fee), they offered to lower their price for a year to make it still more convenient for me.
