Dave and I purchased our new iPhone 6 Pluses at the end of September directly from a local AT&T store. They were having a deal where you could turn in your old iPhone and receive money off your new iPhone. By doing this we were saving about half off the new phones. This was a great deal that we could not pass up. The iPhone 6 Pluses were not available at the store and so we had to order them, being told we would have to pay for them up front and then we would receive a gift card for the return of our old phones (foreshadowing). We were told they would be available in November or December. A long time, but it's not like our current phones didn't work. We could wait.
At the start of October I received an email stating the phones were on schedule to ship between November 7th and 14th. Cool. But the start of November came and I didn't receive an email stating the ETA on the phones. This past Monday while driving back from Chicago we checked the status of the phones and they still said they were to be shipped between the 7th and 14th. Patience, Meredith. My head was all screwed up this week and I thought for sure that the 14th was Thursday. When I still hadn't received an email from AT&T I went onto their website and saw our order had been cancelled. WTF!!!!
Dave called AT&T. (He's like my spokesperson. I'm never calm enough to handle these situations without making it worse.) They were unable to tell us why exactly our order had been cancelled but we could reorder the phones, still receiving our half off deal, but they wouldn't be ready for another month. They also gave us another $25 for the hassle we had been through. I was pissed. I had waited long enough. They told us we could check at local stores to see if any of them had them in stock. We checked and some stores had the 6 Pluses but they weren't the storage size we had initially ordered. But, our local Apple store had them in stock. Dave got on the phone and started working his magic. He's so good at customer service. He called a local AT&T store, explained the situation, and they allowed us to buy the phones directly from Apple and then return our old phones to them still giving us our half off deal. Sweet!
So, on Thursday evening we headed up to the mall to get this all worked out. First we went to the AT&T store to check in and see if anything else was needed to be done before we went to the Apple store. Nope. Then we went to Apple. Wouldn't you know they cut the line off for purchasing the phones 5 minutes before we got there? Son of a bitch! The mall was still two hours from closing! At this point I was too angry to deal with stupid salespeople, so Anderson and I went down to the play place. Dave started working his magic again. First we consulted AT&T to make sure we could still do this dance tomorrow or a later date. Then he went back to Apple to order the phones so they would be ready on Friday. This time he spoke with a different salesperson who said that MAYBE if we ordered the phones that evening that they might be ready by the time the store closed. So we waited. We took Anderson to the food court and got him some dinner. It was after his bedtime, he hadn't eaten, and we were still waiting. Nine o'clock came and went. The mall closed. Our phones were not ready. We were headed home empty handed.
Not even an hour later we received the email notification that our phones were ready. Didn't matter. We were waiting another day. Friday after work, still with a sick baby, still without a babysitter, we headed back to the mall. Our phones were ready, we set them up, went to the AT&T store and got our gift cards, and we were out of the mall in 20 minutes. A big ol' mess but in the end we got what we wanted for the price we wanted.
Here's what happened. The original AT&T salesperson was incorrect. We were not charged up front for the new phones. Our credit cards were charged when the order shipped. Except, our bank had changed our credit cards in October and the credit card the order was under was our old one. Instead of alerting us and asking for a new credit card number, AT&T just cancelled our order without warning and without notification. Poor customer service, but in the end, I think we won.
Have you ever had a nightmare customer service/buying experience?
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Man, that sucks! What a hassle! I'm with you, I have trouble dealing with that stuff in a calm and rational manner. I dropped an f-bomb on the receptionist at my gyn's ofc last week. I went in for my annual (scheduled more than 6 mos ago) and was told that dr had left the practice and apparently no one had told me and there was no one else to see me. I was like, what the f?, you couldn't tell me? instead of making me take time off work and haul myself down here and now meaning I need to find someone else to get me in in the next 3 weeks or find another form of birth control? Honestly, I think the f-bomb helped me get an emergency birth control refill though. But I was worried my head was about to turn red, start spinning in circles and shoot off my neck, I was so angry and frustrated!
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