Phone Hell Blog November Archive

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The first principle of doing business is to get money from your clients. The second is to serve them well. The process of getting money from your clients should be done in such a way that you are serving them well in the process.

If you don't get money from your customers, you cannot serve your customers or your shareholders well.

Today, I decided I wanted to add some money to my prepaid Movistar cell phone in Uruguay. I walked into a payment office on the corner of Av Brasil and 26 de Marzo in Montevideo.

The way I like to add money to my phone account is give the clerk my phone number and some money. Before I am out the door, I'll have a message on my phone that the transaction is complete. It sure beats the heck out of trying to scratch the silver off a phone card and hoping I don't scratch the entire number off!

Not to mention the tremendous ecological resources wasted on an unnecessary plastic card, printing, transporation, etc, and my frustration of keying the number in properly. It is also a great disservice to the shareholders of Movistar/Telefonica, as I was given the option of buying a card for 150 or 250 pesos. Had I just forked over the cash and had it done automatically, I would have spent 500 or 1,000 pesos! Sorry shareholders.

OK, back to the problem today. When I entered the payment office, I started to write my phone number on a slip of paper and the clerk asked what I needed. I said I wanted to pay on my Movistar phone. She said, sorry, we only have cards today.

I asked how long and she said the automatic system had been non functional for 3 days... I think the last time I tried to use it was a couple months ago and I had to wait all weekend to add money to my account.

This will also be emailed / faxed to the investors relations, press office and CEO of Telefonica for their comment. I suppose like the recent problem my wife had with Movistar in Colombia where she could add money to her phone their card or not, it isn't likey I'll get any comment on this either.

Hopefully, some important shareholders of Telefonica and/or Movistar will run across this post and light a fire where the sun doesn't shine with the executives of the company to stop talking about Customer Service and start doing something!

When Movistar talks about wanting their customers to be fans, they need to seriously rethink their policy of "locking phones" which would be better equated with slavery than fans... and that is the topic of my next post.

The Chile government was also worried about customers being provided with minimal information. Now if other governments follow the lead of Chile and also require Movistar and other cellular companies to offer good customer service we'll be all set!

"Good customer service" and "uninterrupted service" should both include the prohibition of the sale of "locked" phones.

I can't stand using windows, but figured to "print" / fax one document it would be ok. I fired up my laptop ftpd' the file over, and printed to the vbuzzer fax.

It gives me an error "The total free pages you have sent is over the limit."

There are TWO MAJOR problem with that error message. 1) I didn't send any free faxes and most importantly, 2) I WANT TO PAY FOR SENDING THIS FAX!

Vbuzzer can BUZZ OFF!

She left Colombia on April 25, 2007 and took her phone with her. She returned to Colombia on Nov 4, and purchased a card to add funds to the prepaid phone.

She was not allowed to add funds to the card. She went to a MoviStar office in Barranquilla and was told that the problem was she had converted to a contract wiht a monthly billing on Aug 20, 2007 and never paid the bill.

Therefore, she is unable to add funds to the prepaid phone, or otherwise place any calls from it. MoviStar claims that she was called on Aug 20 and agreed to the monthly billing. Not a likely event since the phone was not in their service area and she never spoke to them (and she is only visits Colombia occassionally, would have no interest in such a plan).

I called MoviStar in Spain at: +34 680013300 and was told to try to Colombia office at: +57 1-650-0000 (and another number in Spain that seemed to be a very confused customer). At their office in Bogota I was told a different story.

I was told that after you don't use your phone for 3 months, you lose the number. That's fine, except the number that worked on April 25, still works for receiving calls. I was told that they would check into it and call my wife.

She's still waiting and still can make any calls.

Maybe MoviStar would like to make a response here.