This morning I noticed that I'm running out of data (~480 MB out of 500 MB used), so I decided to upgrade my plan. I called to the customer service centre and asked them to do that. I switched to $45 plan which gives 2 GB of data per month, so I had more than 1500 MB left. I got text message confirming my plan change.
Unfortunately, after several hours I got another text saying that I have used my high-speed data. I logged in to My T-Mobile and was really surprised to see that it says that I've used 2 GB of data. I'm sure that I didn't, because my Android phone keeps track of the data usage and it says that I used 510 MB since the beginning of the month. I can understand that there can be small differences because the phone and T-Mobile might calculate the amount of data used differently, but the tool was reasonably accurate last several months that I've been using T-Mobile (the numbers shown by my phone were off by 2-3% compared with the numbers on the website).
What I believed has happened, is that the system kept track of the data that I have *left*, instead of the data that I already have used, and after the plan upgrade they decided that I still have the same 20 MB left, even though it should have been 1520 MB instead.
So I called to the customer services again and explained the situation. The girl was really nice and polite, she looked into the history of my data usage and explained that she can see that my phone was making data transactions every 10 minutes, most of them were less than 1 MB, some of them were bigger. Then I asked her how long does it take to use 1500 MB if you use 1 MB every 10 minutes. She didn't know the answer, so I helped her to calculate, that it's 250 hours, which is more than 10 days, and I've changed my plan about 4 hours ago. She agreed that it looks strange, then said something like "but sometimes the transactions are even more frequent, almost every minute", but I could feel that she can obviously see that the total of those transactions does not actually make 1500 MB, but she just wasn't able to do anything, as "the system says that the total is 2GB". In the end (after more than 25 minutes) she promised to pass my concerns to someone else to inspect the situation further.
In all decent companies that care about their reputation and want their clients to be happy with their service, customer service staff actually *can* do something about the problems that people have, instead of saying "Yes, that looks strange". If you call Starbucks to complain that you didn't get the free drink that you deserved, they would instantly give it to you, apologise, and give another free drink as a compensation for the inconvenience that it caused to you. That's why people love it. You don't need to spend 25 minutes on the phone just to hear that "Sorry, I really cannot do anything about it". Apparently T-Mobile doesn't want their customers to have a pleasant experience with their services and that is really sad.
Best regards,
Rimas