‘Better Call Dan’ tackles Radford couple’s T-Mobile billing snafu

When Landes experiences a consumer issue with a major corporation, she picks up the phone and calls their customer service line. But first she grabs a pen and some paper.

She keeps a careful chronology of every contact, and notes the name of the person to whom she spoke, the time of the call, how long it lasted and what the customer service representative tells her.

Nancy listens carefully — even to the recorded messages on the customer service line. And that came into play late in her six-month-long saga of dissatisfaction with wireless carrier T-Mobile.

Unfortunately, few of the T-Mobile reps that Landes and her husband, Bill, have spoken to since March have been of great help.

When Nancy Landes contacted yours truly, her main issue was a $449.19 charge from the company. The Landeses believed it should have been cancelled. Instead, they were getting calls from bill collectors demanding the sum.

Bill, 71, and Nancy, 67, were Verizon wireless customers until earlier this year. Then on March 5 the couple switched carriers. They joined T-Mobile after it started offering a package for senior citizens. The Landeses believed it would save them money.

The contract they signed included two new phones. The problem was, those barely worked in one room of their home and not in the others. The phones only barely worked in their yard, too.

“From the very beginning with T-Mobile, we had problems with cell coverage. We live in the middle of Radford but the only way I could talk on my phone was if I went outside. And then once outside, I had to stand completely still while talking,” Nancy told me.

“One time I thought I’d pull some weeds while I was having a long conversation on my phone while outside. Well, every time I bent over, I would lose signal and the person I was talking to would not be able to hear what I was saying!”

The couple first contacted T-Mobile about the problem on March 12, a week after they signed up. Their contract allowed them two weeks to cancel and return the phones.

The first time, customer service “tried to say we were in a low signal area despite our location in a flat neighborhood in the middle of town,” Landes said.

The March 12 call to T-Mobile was hardly their last. The Landes lodged a second complaint that month. And another in April, and four more in July.

After one of the calls, T-Mobile technical support diagnosed the problem as bad SIM cards. The company sent the couple new SIMs. Their reception was no better. It might even have been worse, Nancy said.

“At first, I could not use my phone (to place or receive calls) downstairs in our den and bedroom — I was only able to use it upstairs. Then, I could only use the phone in one room: our dining room upstairs. Finally, I could only use my phone outside my house,” she told me.

In a subsequent — and nighttime — skirmish with technical support, “they tried to say we needed to buy some kind of signal booster,” Nancy recalled. That was on July 27. Instead, the Landeses demanded to be let out of their contract. They had had enough.

That night, a T-Mobile supervisor named Dominic told them the company would cancel the contract and take back their phones. They tried to complete the cancellation at a T-Mobile store in Fairlawn the next day. But the store would not accept the phones.

A clerk told the couple T-Mobile would send them proper packaging in which they could mail the phones back to T-Mobile. But that never happened, Nancy said, even though they made a subsequent (and fruitless) attempt to obtain that packaging.

In the meantime, the Landes signed up with another wireless carrier.

Then this month, Bill began getting calls from bill collectors, demanding $449.19 for the T-Mobile phones the Landeses had not returned. A series of phone calls with T-Mobile customer-service reps ensued. Those were in the daytime, which is important.

To summarize what Nancy told me: The daytime customer-services reps (who are in Richmond) refused to acknowledge that T-Mobile’s nighttime customer-service reps (who are in the Philippines) had promised to take the Landeses’ phones back.

To one rep, Nancy suggested that T-Mobile check its own digital audio files. (A recording when you first call T-Mobile customer service informs callers everything is being recorded.) But the rep declined, and wouldn’t budge on the $449.19 charge for the phones, either.

Who would the company take back the phones, because it was long past the 14-day contract cancellation period. That expired March 19.

In frustration, Nancy wrote me. By email, we had a couple of back-and-forths — I posed questions and she answered them. Eventually she sent me a long and detailed chronology.

Then I reached out via email to Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile Consumer Group.

The message asked Freier if he could help the Landeses get the recording on which Dominic had promised to take back their phones — or if there was anything else Freier could do to help resolve the issue. I included Nancy’s chronology.

I sent that email around noon Sept. 16. Three hours later I got an email from Nancy.

“All I can say is ‘Wow, wow, wow!’ You are a magician!” she wrote.

Minutes earlier, another “John” from T-Mobile had called Bill Landes, profusely apologized for the couple’s less-than-satisfactory experience and promised to call off the bill collectors.

John from T-Mobile told Bill “that while the Better Business Bureau complaint we filed on 9/14 got their attention, it wasn’t until they heard from you that they sprang into action!” Nancy wrote.

She said she learned five lessons from the experience:

“1. Document, document, document!

2. If the product isn’t working as expected and promoted, don’t accept it!

3. Be persistent and don’t just accept the ‘nos’ you get from countless company representatives.

4. Involve consumer protection agencies such as the BBB.

5. But most of all, when all else fails — Better Call Dan!”

“My husband and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You didn’t have to help us but you did,” she added. “You rock, Dan Casey!”

I also heard from someone at T-Mobile. (Unfortunately, I accidentally purged that email.)

But it was unusually gracious. He thanked me for bringing the Landeses’ plight to the company’s attention, and for giving T-Mobile a chance to make it right.