Orange mobile phones (The lost art of customer service part one)
Aug 27th, 2008 by handolio
Every now and then on the internet you come across some boring old bastard with an axe to grind about some company that’s pissed them off lately. This is that bastard, Orange is that company, here’s my axe:
My mobile’s fucked*. I bought it from Orange, a customer of whose I’ve been since 1996 – 12 uninterrupted years over which I’ve probably paid them a total of £3,000 or more. I rang them to tell them, we went through the basics, they agreed it was fucked, arranged a swap out, and almost as an afterthought (this after two 20-minute attempts to get through followed by a 20-minute phone call) mentioned that I’d need to pay them something like £70 upfront, or £30, followed by four months at £6 a month.
I reminded the chap on the phone that I’d bought my phone from them less than a year earlier, and thus it was under warranty and I would be paying them nothing. He explained that warranty repairs now go through the manufacturer.
Now, I recognise that this is fairly standard practice these days – most online retailers have a dead-on-arrival period, within which they’ll swap products out without complaint. Beyond that, you might have to deal with the manufacturer.
I asked if, rather than pay money for a warranty repair, they’d let me pay to upgrade the phone. They wouldn’t.
My grinds are as follows:
1) I pay Orange a monthly fee and am contractually-obliged to do so until March 2009. It’s not asking too much for them to sort out a fucked mobile, particularly as its fucked-ness affects my ability to spend more money with them.
2) When I first joined the network they prided themselves on customer service. Getting a faulty phone swapped out (and I had several) was quick and easy. The interactions I’ve had with them in the last five years have become increasingly unsatisfactory, to the extent that they had started to weaken any loyalty I felt. It’s now gone altogether.
Orange schmorange
I’m by no means alone. My brother – also a long-term Orange customer – recently went thermonuclear when Orange refused to pay out under their “amusingly-named ‘OrangeCare’” service, which had been costing him an additional £5 a month. His sin was to have broken his mobile just before leaving for a festival, neglecting to report it to Orange until his return – outside the 48-hour limit.
See, he could just have lied, but he told them the truth assuming that they might treat him like, say, a long-term customer. Or at least a grown up.
I have two points that I’d like to make. First, when I reach the end of my contract, I’ll go with whoever can offer me the best deal and Orange are likely to lose a customer.
Second, while writing as a technology journalist I must park personal bias and preferences in the interests of objectivity and impartiality.
But whilst writing on my personal blog, I’m free to use a title and URL that include the words “Orange customer service”, and say that in my opinion Orange are a shower of c*nts. Unlike perhaps eight years ago, I wouldn’t dream of recommending them to anyone.
*DISCLAIMER: In the interests of fairness, I should point out that I’m not going to take the argument further because the demise of my phone may or may not be related to an incident with a soft drink last October. The point is that whether or not my dead mobile is my fault, I would at least expect Orange to sort it out for me, and be in touch to charge me later if it did turn out that I’d killed it. There are customers out there who don’t have a soft drink problem, and Orange is charging to sort their phones out, too.
So your bill averages £20 a month?
I used to be a customer of Orange until they told me that since my average bill was only £20 a month, I wasn’t entitled to any sort of upgrade because the computer said I was a “low grade” customer.
Nice.
Hi Sally, that’s how I (roughly) estimate it. I think way back I paid around £15-20 a month, and it’s only in recent years that I’ve ended up averaging £30-plus. I’ve been told similar things in recent years when asking for an upgrade, although they just stopped short of constructively dismissing me in the same way you experienced.
Thanks for the mention, by the way
Exact same thing happened to me. Been with Orange for going on 5 years and spend on average £50 – £70 per month with them. Had my phone stolen so called them up saying I needed a replacement and they told me I had to pay £30 or so in order to get one.
I argued the point stating the ridiculous business-sense of punishing customers without considering the bigger picture i.e. me leaving at the end of my contract, which was just 3 months away.
They wouldn’t budge and I’m now just biding my time before a shiny new iPhone with O2 arrives on my desk.
I am that brother, and that’s a pretty fair summary of what happened to me…
It was an annoyingly small problem. The stylus on my SPV M3100 had broken — during normal use, no knock or drop required — and the remains were lodged in the storage recess in the unit. If Orange had offered to get someone to take a pair of pliers to it and then send it back minus the broken pieces, I would have been entirely happy.
Things with Orange don’t work that way any more, though.
The “OrangeCare” you pay for these days is, ironically, a sign of how much Orange *don’t* care. The responsibility for any problem with a phone is now outsourced to an insurance company. Never mind warranty returns, minor repair issues, or anything else that they used to deal with. A broken piece of plastic is dealt with using the same procedure as a phone dropped from a 50th floor window. If it’s dealt with at all, it turns in to an insurance claim for the entire cost of a replacement phone. Once Orange get the money from the insurance company, they send you a new one.
Of course they get a lot of people trying to scam new phones out of them on dubious grounds. I can understand them wanting to be cautious, and to impose basic safeguards like expecting you to report incidents promptly. And you can be sure that, had I dropped my phone from a 50th floor window, I would have contacted them straight away.
But be honest — how quickly do most people report a broken piece of plastic? How urgent does that feel, as a life issue? Particularly if you’re about to go away for several days?
So I stuck my SIM in my old Nokia so I had a working phone while I was away, and forgot to make the call to Orange when I got back home. I didn’t report it for, ooh, about two weeks in the end. And during all of that time my SPV M3100 sat on my desk, in exactly the same spot, from the moment the plastic stylus broke until the moment I phoned Orange to report it. I was under contract, including “OrangeCare”, all of that time. Nothing changed.
When I did phone Orange, I went through several fruitless conversations before finally receiving an angry-sounding lecture from a customer service rep, as if I was a naughty child for not having reported the issue sooner. They put me on hold while they spoke to the insurance company, and then relayed to me that they had declined to pay out. Translation: we’re not going to help you.
The thing is, I’m not interested in the insurance company. I don’t care whether they pay out or not. I don’t care whether I get a replacement phone or not. All I wanted was for someone at Orange to treat me as a customer, for goodness sake, and work out some way to address the problem with my phone. I pay £5 a month for “OrangeCare”, I thought, is this too much to ask?
It would seem so.
And the irony is that they’re trying to protect themselves from insurance fraud! If I had lied to them, I would have a replacement phone by now. I have been penalised by morons for not lying. And, having divested themselves of any responsibility for anything, Orange seem quite content to let a small piece of broken plastic turn in to a customer service disaster.
Ah well. I’m counting the days until my Orange contract is up. I don’t pay anyone £35 a month to treat me like that. I’m going to buy my own handset, insure it myself, and go SIM-only or pay-as-you-go.
Bravo for documenting your experiences.
I too was a long-term customer of Orange, and noticed a rapid and infuriating decline in its once outstanding customer service that eventually led me to up and leave (I went to Vodafone, which was excellent and I only left them a year ago on cost grounds).
One word of advice/warning – don’t go to T-Mobile when you do change networks. While the price plans are good value, you’ll find the customer service to be as bad, if not worse, than Orange.
Par for the course. I ditched Orange back in Feb (http://markhigginson.com/blog/2008/02/21/my-future-is-no-longer-orange/) after seven years as they had become progressively more appalling. I took up with O2, only paying them £15 a month on a Simplicity tariff then got tempted by the iPhone so they now get a good sum each month. Must be smiles all round at their office reading posts like this… Orange are committing suicide by (lack of) customer service.
Wow – this is like group therapy for ex-Orange customers. So, in that vein, my name’s Tom and I haven’t made a monthly payment to Orange for two years now.
I also quit because, when my contract term expired, the company didn’t appear to care whether it kept my business or not. Was surprised by what Chris wrote above about T-Mobile, though – I moved there, tempted by the ludicrously cheap data plans, and have stayed since. When my contract came up for renewal I was fully braced for a huge argument over why I should get an upgrade / discount, but in the end T-M was quite happy to cut the cost of my tariff in half to keep me. I’m just slightly peeved that they don’t carry the E71.
I’m another person who has defected from Orange to O2. I hit the same problem when hoping to upgrade – offered increasingly rubbish handsets and told the ‘deals’ for airtime etc weren’t open to me because (and I quote the chap in the shop) “you don’t spend enough money to be worth us having as a customer”. Fine – all the other networks seem to be keen to keep me. Agreed that Orange has changed its whole attitude to customer in the last few years – they used to have a good ‘feel’, but are now just another faceless, miserable giant.
OMG- oh my holy cheese balls of god
ya see! finally, i find somebody who WILL express their view!
my phone got fucked up, im with orange…i really just wanna throw a lot of oranges AT them, but hey…its just recently on contract and i’m paying off quite a bit…more like their shoveling MY money away with fucking gleaming grins of satanism…
but still…thats not the hugely blow out part yet…
it broke- and yeah it might have hit some condensation…been in a few splashes with wet hands or in heat a bit, but things shouldnt just fuck up with it (btw the soft drink isnt your fault hun- apparently orange owns fate too…the twats) buttons suddenly don;t work, and it says system orange out of range…all the time and then continue playback- i cant even get onto texts, nevermind texting cos it pops up so fricin’ much, i go back to the store, “hey there, theres a problem with this phone…”
they smile, although grimly like i’ve just killed their mother, and take it away behind the counter in another room, they come back seems days later and say “we can’t do anything, it’s been damaged”
they show me on the side where its cracked- and yeah it took me days to get the back on cos its so complicated and the plastic cracked, im like… “how can that affect the phone…its on the side…before it even went on the phone”
they handed it back and the fucking smug “theres nothing we can do, how about another selection of phones” or ya know *give us more of your money to fuck with*
pisses me off
o2 are sooo much more loyal, i get rewarded for topping up, or getting a certain plan and the other day i just rang up their helpline and asked how the guy was…
nice chat, he’s irish
and i’m now un-single
whoo
i feel your pain hun, i think we should regroup and like…burn down orange, would be ironic…fire is orange
I’m a current Orange customer of 8 years, my phone has just died again for the second time in 10 months. The first time I phoned OrangeCare was quite a pain free experience, they agreed on the fault and said i would have a replacement in 24 hours. Sounds like a good service, but then he went on to say that, out of good will, he would cancel the £15 admin fee. I went away happy untill my next phone bill came through the door and they had slapped me with the admin charge, not so happy anymore.
Now i’ve got to go through this again tomorrow and i’ll be asking for a replacment of a different phone that is the same spec, the OrangeCare policy states you can do this, however i just have a feeling they will down right refuse this and make up some excuse as to why they can’t do it, so i exect to be stuck with a new N73 that will no doubt break in a few months just becuse i tried to make a call, or take a picture or even just breathe on it.
Wish me luck!!!
Glad it’s not just me guys! I just got off my somewhat useless HTC Touch Dual from Orange BUSINESS CARE! I have always stuck with them, spend on average £60-£70 per month, and I have always stuck with Orange simply because of their customer service and the fact that whenever I have a problem with my phone, on which I rely for work, they replace it quickly and without fuss. This has got more and more problematic of late. Today, I’d had enough. The phone I have is useless. It deletes numbers when I try to synhcronise it with my PC which is half the reason I bought the damn thing. It turns itself off randomly. It doesn’t answer when I receive a call. it takes 5 attempts to make a call. The list goes on and many friends of mine with the same phone have the same problem. Orange forced me to speak to HTC, who told me to speak to Microsoft. Years back Orange would have offered me a free upgrade on the spot, or a straight swap at least. Worst case, they’d have let me paid to upgrade. Now….they won’t even let me pay them to upgrade my handset. And I am a business customer who regularlly spends £100 plus in a month when I go abroad. What the hell is going on?! I am stuck with them now, for lord knows how many more months. I took an 18month contract this time and didn’t mind at all because it’s Orange and I trusted them and they look after me, now I can’t wait to leave and go to O2. They wanted £380 for me to leave them at this stage and I must be at least 8months into my contract. I am stunned. I hope they are reading this and change things before they loose a LOT of customers!
Well, im an ‘orange business customer’ who is mega p***ed off with the service ‘orange’ offer atm, including their lack of a decent freephone customer services line (or at least not a mobile line).
I had entered into an 18month contract (so I thought) which later they manipulated into a 24month contract. I obviously opened up a big can of email ‘whoopayass’ on them.
I have emailed them many times saying things like “Im going to report you to OFCOM for infringement of ‘Distance Selling’ Consumer Protection Regulations” (reg 8/2/e; conditions for exercising my contractual right to cancel the contract, where the contract is of an UNSPECIFIED duration or a duration exceeding one year). I also finished one email with “See you in COURT” lmao.
There are laws in this country that try to protect us from villains such as ORANGE. The only thing is, upon reading up on those laws and regulations you can see how they have ‘tried’ to cover all bases.
I know I have a right to pull out of a contract, if I feel the customer service is ’sub-standard’, the ‘helplines’ are akin to torture with excessive (probably rigged) hold/waiting times between transfers and you often feel like youve been passed over so many times you wish you hadn’t bothered.
Not to mention a contract that doesn’t physically exist (never signed anything) but, I did get something from a company called ‘MobilesNorthWest’ and it stated “from 18 months” as my contract outlay. When does that end you might ask yourself?
Well, with that rule they could have you on a contract ‘indefinately’.
Current legislation supports them (see afore mentioned regs) in this particularly ridiculous matter. To be able to detail a contract that technically doesnt exist, and of no fixed term or duration known to myself is a farce! I had to ask ‘them’ what contract I was on.
Well, I think that the length of our posts says it all. ORANGE are the worst ppl I have ever had the misfortune to deal with.
AVOID THEM LIKE THE PLAGUE… before its too late (an extra hair folicle is ‘greying’ as I type) . DONT USE THEIR CUSTOMER HELPLINES! Email them instead and document/save a copy into your email folders. You now have dated evidence you attempted contact with them.
Orange are definately a shower money grabbing sadistic and customer ignoring c**ts.
I’m not contract. I’m pay as you go. I WAS with Vodafone. BRILLIANT service, no problems, good value for money, free texts evenings and weekends, you name it.
But I sooooooo longed for a qwerty phone, got myself a nice little LG KS360 – it came with Orange, but as I understood it, it is my god given legal RIGHT to unlock it to any network I want. I wanted to put my vodafone card in it.
I couldn’t. No place will do it, they wanted to keep it for days and then after days, tell me can’t be done. I contact orange. “Sorry, can’t be done, you need to stay contracted to us for 3 months” (I’m not ON a fucking contract?!) and pay us £20. (Fucking cheek, holding MY phone for hostage – I thought the point of being non-contract was that you weren’t HELD to any terms and conditions!?).
I tried to make the best of it, so I signed up to their “Dolphin” pay as you go plan which states you can pay £10 top up and get 300 free texts, plus free access to myspace, facebook and bebo. Brilliant I thought, it might not be so bad. Oh but it was. I topped up £10 around 3 days after I signed up on Orange for that plan. No free texts, no free facebook. NADA. Zilch. I logged their site to see that their unreliable error-loving site had reset ALL the details I had set it to including my plan. No free texts for me.
FINE, I thought. I gave it a few days, tried to get over it. I find there’s no FULL games on my phone so I go on Orange. They have games. I search for games SPECIFICALLY for the KS360 which is a qwerty sliding phone (slides out sideways). It gives me a list that “brain genius” is for my phone and highly compatible. I download it, am charged £5 for the privelage (even though their site claimed it was only £3), and THEN find out they’ve sent me the version of the phone NOT intended for a qwerty phone (so it’s around the wrong way and it CAN’T be played, it will load, but that’s about all, keys are all wrong, etc).
I’ve emailed them demanding money back or them to upload me the correct version.
What did I get?
Email back, “sorry you’re having problems with our service, Orange always strives to blah blah blah blah provide the best (laughable) service, etc”. And then, here’s the clincher, “Did you know you can get a free pizza if you buy a pizza at Pizza express if you’re with orange? You can also get two cinema tickets for the price of one with orange”…
AS IF THAT FUCKING COMPENSATES ANYTHING!?!?!?!?! “We’re SORRY we’ve conned you out of money, but if you’re buying something you don’t need anyway, you can have a DOUBLE helping. THAT MAKES THE WHOLE THING BETTER.”
I think Marilyn Manson should ass rape them with something spikey, personally…
Yes…
>>>But I sooooooo longed for a qwerty phone, got myself a nice little LG KS360 – it came with Orange, but as I understood it, it is my god given legal RIGHT to unlock it to any network I want. I wanted to put my vodafone card in it.
It is your god given legal right to be stupid.
Has the iphone taught you nothing at all? You don’t have any legal right to get unlocking codes in UK — whether iphone under contract or PAYG iphone, O2 ain’t giving the unlocking code to you.
Well this one just rolls and rolls, doesn’t it?
For the record, my contract expired, I rang Orange, they weren’t interested in matching an 02 SIM-only deal so I switched and ported my number across. It all went seamlessly, except Orange have cocked up the last bill.
I’ve still got the ancient phone I had to revert to after my newer one finally bought it. And I still think people should be able to put a status on their phones.
I’ve been paying orange between £35 and £50 for 3 years now and have been happy with the phone they gave me. Now it’s time for me to lower my service plan (don’t need extras like the broadband internet included anymore) to something around £25 and thought I might as well take a new phone.
The selection is awful, where do they get off charging hundreds of pounds for an upgraded phone? the free selection is woeful, all low quality iphone copies which I don’t want, a single decent Sony Ericsson and not a Nokia in sight. I know for a fact that if I walked into an Orange shop as a new customer I would be offered better phones for free on signing a contract, why do their existing customers who have paid THOUSANDS to them not get the same treatment?
I’m tempted to go with someone else, I just dread the inevitable hoops that I’ll be made to jump through in order to cancel my service and migrate my number. I’ve dealt with Orange Broadband before and they’re an absolute nightmare when it comes to customer service.
I’m on Orange Pay- as-you-Go and when my phone started acting up (only bought it in April), I phoned and they arranged a replacement. I recieved the replacement in a day, but their advisors forgot to tell me that I’d have to keep my battery from the old one.
I phoned again and asked about the battery, the man I spoke to said he could send out a brand new handset complete with battery which I recieved soon after. When the battery, nor the handset wouldn’t work I phoned again and asked them about the options now because I wasn’t at fault. At first it seemed like I was getting somewhere but soon I encountered the full force of their disgraceful treatment of customers.
In two weeks, I hadn’t had a working phone yet they were making it out that I wanted a replacement for vanity reasons. They sent me a battery 2 weeks after I asked, but out of three batteries (one from an older phone, the brand new one and one I bought when I thought they weren’t going to send me a battery) none of them worked or charged. So I put it down to the phone being faulty.
Then I began to phone them near enough every day several times a day, it became a daily routine and not one person was helpful or even wanted to hear my experience with their customer services. Soon, they even refused to help me and hung up on me or left me on hold for more than 20 minutes only to cut the phone off. On the odd occassions I did get through, they told me that no such orders for replacements were put through yet other advisors said I had so many requests for replacements. When I tried to get through again only a couple of days ago, I encountered even worse treatment. When I asked about a replacement, the one that I had been assured was on its way in 2 working days, the advisor told me in no uncertain terms that they weren’t my ‘meal ticket’ and then hung up on me. My meal- ticket. That’s how Orange treat their business. With misleading information and advisors who refuse point blank to advise. How they haven’t been given a whole 1/2 hour on Watchdog is beyond me.
My advice would be don’t even think about going to Orange even if they are getting the iPhone, go to Vodafone or unlock it completely and go somewhere else. By far the worst customer service that any company has to offer and that includes the legend of BSkyB. Orange don’t care about their customers and neither did T-Mobile when I was with them, so their proposed merger will be welcomed with open arms by me when I terminate my account and move away from them.
By the way, Orange make a big deal out of their 2 for 1 cinema tickets, and I found out Empire have their own offer. 1/2 price ticket Tuesday and that’s more compatible with my days than the Wednesday. I’m still going to pay the full price of one ticket and thus I have no business with Orange once Ofcom and CISAS have sorted out this mess and I’ve been compensated accordingly with a full refund of the phone purchased and other things. I’ll buy another Orange phone, but I know someone who unlocks them then I’ll terminate my account with Orange and go elsewhere.