Our experience with Cingular has left a very bad taste in my mouth. here customer service is insulting and rude, and the quality of service is simply awful. They outright lied on several phone conversations. Very bad business if you ask me.

It all started over a year ago now. We signed up with Bell South which we were very happy with, then Cingular took over the account and all of our troubles started.

We originally had a contract for 49.99 a month 800 minutes and all incoming calls were free. This was pretty good for us, but we kept running over a little every month. The next plan up was 1,000 minutes for 69.99 a month. We went ahead and upgraded our account. he hone rep said that this would be a new contract and all incoming calls were still free.

During this time we had made a few calls to them inquiring about the decrease in quality. We had a lot of problems with the signal. Many areas the phone would not work at all in, and most of the time where it did work it did not work well. Many calls got cut off and most of the time you could only hear parts of what the other party was saying. Customer service assured us many times nothing had changed , when we insisted that something must have changed we were informed that we were wrong.

Now last month our bill comes in. It is more than double the bill we are used to getting. Needless to say we called right away and asked for an explanation, which customer service was unable to give us. We were just supposed to accept this rise in the bill without question I guess. We were not satisfied so called again and specifically asked if our incoming calls were still free of charge. Upon asking them this flat out then they told us no they were not that our contract had ended. We had no idea otherwise we would have signed a new contract. We had been under the impression when we upgraded from what that customer service rep said is that this would be a new contract. So in our minds we still had time. On the phone they explained that it is not up to them to let us know our contract will be coming to an end that this is in our original contract and is our responsibility. Now this really upset me considering my father is with this same company and they notified him a month before his contract ended.

During this phone conversation we brought up again about the drop in signal quality once again it was denied that anything had changed. They also kept trying to sell us on a new contract the whole time, which seemed insane when we are calling letting them know how badly we feel we have been treated.

Now it was time to find a new company and several shops that we visited happen to deal with Cingular among other companies . They informed us the drop in quality was due to a tower in the area being down due to bird nesting and all other towers in the area had been adjusted to make up for the holes in the coverage. This had been this way for quite a while

Final contact with Cingular: We call to cancel our service as we have found another company. At which time we confronted them with the tower problem. At this time they admitted that this was true and offered us a 40.00 refund. Honestly that was nice but insulting at the same time. We still had to pay more than our normal bill. I feel they should have charged us our normal monthly bill amount and dropped all those incoming call charges that we were unaware we were being charged for.

What angers us most is not even the bad service or the deception. It is the manner in which we were spoken to by customer service.

We now have AT&T. Something interesting, the Cingular phone was still connected for a couple days for those 2 days we traveled with both phones and did a comparison on the signal power (the little bars that let you know how good the signal is). Every time in every place that we went the AT&T signal outperformed the Cingular at least by 100%.We plan to wait a few months before writing an epinion on our new AT&T service but so far it looks like it will be a good one.


Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 69.99