Comments on: Orange mobile phones (The lost art of customer service part one)

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:45:36 +0000

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!

By: Andy H

Andy H — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:45:06 +0000

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!!!

By: fiona

fiona — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:41:16 +0000

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

By: Emma Jackson

Emma Jackson — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:40:08 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:35:43 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:37:40 +0000

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.

By: Chris Green

Chris Green — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:20:54 +0000

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.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:02:19 +0000

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.

By: Dan Leach

Dan Leach — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:54:53 +0000

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.

By: handolio

handolio — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:54:10 +0000

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