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!!!