Orange Data Plans; People who listen to customers

I like Orange. I’ve been with them for a long time. Whenever I upgrade they are very competitive. However just before I got my N95 they cancelled all their data plans, and caused me to write this blog post.

I called Orange back yesterday and spoke to someone who was very pleasant, but not able to help (and by the way the ability to simply select an option for “I want to talk to a person” is still making me smile, it’s so rare these days). He did however offer to get a manager to call me back. After about 20 minutes of no call I thought it would turn out as it does when British Gas promise the same thing.

However, I did receive a call. I spoke to a very switched on chap called Jan. I would say that Orange should give him a promotion but I worry about taking good people out of the front lines when customers are calling needing to get stuff done. We chatted for a long time and he was very open to my point that Orange calling a 30mb capped package unlimited was very out of sync with the market. The rest of the market refers to unlimited as a 1gb cap.

Part of the problem is that Orange don’t give customers a way to realisticly experience data. They have a “3G trial” package which you get for a couple of months when you switch to a 3G phone. During the trial you get a 1gb a month of data for 3G stuff. Then if you don’t cancel you get automatically moved to a 4mb plan. It’s absolutely insane, talk about disparity. It makes Orange seem like a drug dealer, getting you hooked on unrealistically cheap and plentiful data and then charging you through the nose when it’s too late to back out. After a little discussion he offered to wipe any additional data charges from my account for a month, so I could find out if I really needed a gb. That’s pretty good customer service.

He promised to investigate and feed my concerns up. It’s simple really, I want to use data. I’m a geek I will happily use lots and lots of data, but I want to pay Orange a competitive price for it. The best deal he could find was 500mb/mo of GPRS for something like £50. I don’t want GPRS hell no, I want 1gb of 3.5G data for something which competes with T-Mobile’s web ‘n’ walk. I really hope Jan gets back to me.

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orange, data, dataplan, carriers, tmobile, 3g, n95, customerservice

I like Orange. I’ve been with them for a long time. Whenever I upgrade they are very competitive. However just before I got my N95 they cancelled all their data plans, and caused me to write this blog post.

I called Orange back yesterday and spoke to someone who was very pleasant, but not able to help (and by the way the ability to simply select an option for “I want to talk to a person” is still making me smile, it’s so rare these days). He did however offer to get a manager to call me back. After about 20 minutes of no call I thought it would turn out as it does when British Gas promise the same thing.

However, I did receive a call. I spoke to a very switched on chap called Jan. I would say that Orange should give him a promotion but I worry about taking good people out of the front lines when customers are calling needing to get stuff done. We chatted for a long time and he was very open to my point that Orange calling a 30mb capped package unlimited was very out of sync with the market. The rest of the market refers to unlimited as a 1gb cap.

Part of the problem is that Orange don’t give customers a way to realisticly experience data. They have a “3G trial” package which you get for a couple of months when you switch to a 3G phone. During the trial you get a 1gb a month of data for 3G stuff. Then if you don’t cancel you get automatically moved to a 4mb plan. It’s absolutely insane, talk about disparity. It makes Orange seem like a drug dealer, getting you hooked on unrealistically cheap and plentiful data and then charging you through the nose when it’s too late to back out. After a little discussion he offered to wipe any additional data charges from my account for a month, so I could

He promised to investigate and feed my concerns up. It’s simple really, I want to use data. I’m a geek I will happily use lots and lots of data, but I want to pay Orange a competitive price for it. The best deal he could find was 500mb/mo of GPRS for something like £50. I don’t want GPRS hell no, I want 1gb of 3.5G data for something which competes with T-Mobile’s web ‘n’ walk. I really hope Jan gets back to me.