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DC94 T-Mobile Customer Service Nightmare
Design Critique: Products for People
English - November 21, 2012 03:56 - 18 minutes - 10.8 MB - ★★★★ - 11 ratingsBusiness Arts Design design factors human userexperience designthinking interview research usability user Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Even when the initial user experience of a product is good, the total customer experience suffers when a company ignores service after the sale. We at Design Critique argue that service after the sale IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF A PRODUCT'S DESIGN because it directly affects the customer experience. Only bad companies isolate product design from customer service design. In Tim's case, T-Mobile destroyed a loyal, 8-year customer relationship for its monthly prepaid service by
* Refusing to help replace a smart phone under warranty when it broke, in any kind of realistic time frame,
* Refusing to unlock the phone after selling it on the condition it would be unlocked after 90 days, and
* Implying its monthly prepaid customers are not worth helping because only long term contract customers deserve good customer service.
It's a comedy of errors unless you're the one who wasted hundreds of dollars and hours of time dealing with T-Mobile's agressively anti-customer practices. What lessons can we draw from T-Mobile's mistakes?
One anecdote does not make a statistically significant trend, but anecdotes provide useful insights into the how and why of customer service failures.