Open Letter to David Dyson, CEO of Three Mobile

Oh god. My week has been beset by a first world problem.

Mobile phone contract renegotiation.

Brrr. Needless to say that my week has been full of useless calls to bloody useless customer services over and over again, in a cornucopia of failure and misery. Three Mobile. You. Yoooooou. I call you to account. Your useless, thieving, lying... actually, no. I can do better. You see, when venting on Twitter, a lovely account CEOemail gave me, of all things, the email to Three Mobile's CEO.

He may have nothing to do with my experience's with his shoddy company. But his customer service wasted a hell of a lot of my time. So. I'm going to waste his.

(Incidentally, if you're on Three Mobile and are having problems, then I highly recommend giving ol' Dave an email. Maybe if he gets enough of them he'll find the incentive to get a customer service that doesn't actively fuck you over.)

Open Letter to David Dyson, CEO of Three Mobile

Hello David,

I'm writing to you today to explain why I have left your company and sought new providers for my mobile service. I figured you might like to know why because your customer services certainly did, seeing that I've been a customer of yours since 2007, but I got the feeling that, weeeell, they just weren't listening. No. They really weren't when it felt like the only way to progress the conversation off the loop they were sticking to was to mention that I had a lawyer and was willing to call him if it let me cancel my contract... but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Your prices are rubbish. I've been paying prices for two years that would have got me an iPhone – not the new one, I admit, but the 3G iPhone would have drastically outperformed my chunk of rubbish (Note: I don't actually want an iPhone, I just picked it because they're so damn expensive.) It doesn't help that on the eleventh hour one of your customer service representatives revealed that I barely use any of my allowance – why the hell did I go on paying for an allowance I wasn't using? Especially since I came to expect an extra fiver of costs every month to land on my bill. How does that happen?

Your unit measurement is a joke; minutes and texts are a singular unit. Look. We all know that texts cost you nothing. We all know that phones are constantly sending SMS messages to stay in contact with phone towers and texts just piggy-back off of that. So text equal a minute of air time? Good grief. No. Oh, and don't get me started on your companies constant goal post moving. Charging for delivery rates, charge increases: Look, the contract I agreed to, was the contract I agreed to. In a hypothetical and quite frankly outlandish scenario where I employed you and I decided on Tuesday to take away five percent of your pay for funsies and on Friday to take away your dental care – both which were in an agreed contract since the Monday; you would be pissed. My ass would be in court. But it's all legal with my phone contract. You reserve the right to change it at any time, don't you? Well guess what? It pisses your customers off. It makes your company look like slimy, scummy bastards. Sure, you'll probably get away with it, and you certainly did for many months in my case – but we remember. You aren't trustworthy to me any more. And believe me, I tell every person I come across nowadays to avoid your company. I see you as the too expensive, money-grubbing, liars option. You are reasonably going to protest that, that it may be unfair to tar you with that brush.

But that is what you look like to me.

Also your coverage is crap. Just putting it out there.

But on equal standing to your business dealings has to be your customer service. Please note I resisted the urge to put the word service in sarcastic quotation marks; is was very difficult not to. Your customer service. Just... just where did you get these people? What god-awful script are you feeding them? They once called me five times in a single hour trying to push deals on me. On the forth call I wearily said in one breath, 'No, I don't want a new phone, none of my friends want a new phone, I don't want to buy any internet or whatever service deals you're offering, leave me alone.' The brilliant bit came next – he got angry at me for not caring! Why should I be angry, who endured a complete waste of my life putting up with this crap, when I should fall over in gratitude for Three Mobile caring about me so much? Look. Let's be adults. You're a company. You exist to sell services. You ain't doing it out of the kindness out of your heart; you're doing it to make money. Don't pretend to me when you're calling me with an offer it's because you're so charmed by my great wit you want to make my life easier. The next call... did not go as well, and that was my fault. I will admit I may have ever-so-slightly lost my patience at the caller, but we all seemed to agree it was all for the best if we never spoke again and that was fine.

So a year or so later and I'm eagerly counting down the days of my contract so I can jump ship and I find myself in Chelmsford, about to buy a shiny new phone. But I want to keep my number. I've been using it for five bleedin' years now. I will never remember another one. So I give your customer service a call to ask for my PAC number and... ohhhhh. This is where we start having fun. What happens next is, well, in a word, uttershitcraptacular.

I get it at this point you don't want to lose a long time loyal customer, or what I call myself in relation to you; a loyal doormat. I get it that if a customer wants to jump ship because of mere price you're willing to work out a deal. I don't get hanging up on me. No. That annoyed me somewhat. It annoyed me further when they called me back... to hang up again. That. That was vexing, I'll admit. So another call happened and I must share this important detail with you; obstructing me from getting to my PAC number by refusing to tell me it until you've told me your 'great deals' is a dick move and god damn it I was meant to avoid using sarcastic quotation marks. Over and over again I said the line 'I wish to cancel my contract and keep my number, please give me my PAC number.' And. They. Wouldn't. Tell. Me. Half an hour of my life flashing away by a person's stubbornness. Hell, I told them a short version of paragraph three, that I wasn't trying to play hard ball, that I'd happily pay more just to get away from you and yet they wouldn't cough it up. What was it he said when I insisted on the PAC number? Ah, yes, 'I never said I wouldn't give it to you, just that if you'd listen to my offers...' NO I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN YOUR OFFERS. MY AUDIABLE RISING HOSTILITY HERE IS MAKING IT QUITE CLEAR A SALE IS NOT GOING TO TAKE PLACE. If I was a shop owner, and proceeded to act contrary to my customer's stated desires at every turn I would not be surprised if no one brought anything, resulting in me ending my days at the bottom of a bottle as I die alone and unloved on the streets, covered in lice. So I threatened to call my aforementioned lawyer – also, not a good sign if I feel it necessary to have to start looking up Citizen's Advice when your customer service is actively preventing me from cancelling my contract – and he relented by putting me on hold for twenty minutes. Which I feel only happened because I didn't let him wow me with bollocks. Twenty minutes later I get assurances they'll call me back later that day. That was Sunday.

On Wednesday, with now four days of calling behind my belt and the same promises each time I tried again. I'm actually really polite – they're beaten the anger out of me temporarily. However, as I repeated for the billioneth time, 'No, I must insist you give me my PAC number right now and I have no interest in any deals,' something happens. Not that I make up a riduclous deal on the spot, I was tempted, but your customer service had treated me so badly I couldn't muster the effort (A Samsung Galaxy S3 with 500 minutes, unlimited texts and 1GB data cap at £20 a month with a free case I was musing on spitting out, but I stalled at the possibility of ever having to deal with your customer service again. That and your broken promises.) In the middle of another wearied pointless exchanges, my lovely girlfriend, driven to despair over hearing the same thing over and over for fifteen minutes or simply dreading yet another bitching-fest about your company later and – I love this – she snatched the phone off me, and refused to give it back until they gave her my PAC number. She held me hostage from you. It was beautiful. At this point they revealed that the PAC number was automated and would come by text later tonight in the hope she would return the phone, which she did, and I immediately hung up.

The PAC number. Was automated. Your insufferable customer 'service' (damn it, sorry) kept this from me as a means to keep me on the line to keep me with you. A lie by omission? Well, either way, NO, I DON'T CARE, THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Hours of my time wasted dealing with their crap.

Which brings me labouringly to my point. I'm not here just to vent at you. I'm writing this today because at the end of the day, my time was wasted. In reading this inane dribble, I hope your time is wasted.

Yours in eternal spite,

John L

P.S. Also my phone was crap. Maybe not totally your fault, you didn't make the thing, but I'm into irrational hate here and every time I saw the phrase 'Unexpected Failure' I was tempted to learn how to code phone OS's so that I could replace that phrase with 'Expected Failure,' before setting light to an effigy of Three Mobile's logo.