Quick Facts:
- Best Prepay Company for Customer Satisfaction
- Great Plans
- Only Prepay Plans
Why You’ll Love Them: Great plans! Seriously. They’ve been voted the best prepay company for customer satisfaction by JD Power and Associates. They have plans that compete with the big boys, and what’s more, there’s no contract. It’s all prepay! Plans are every $5, from $30-$50, and every five bucks earns you another unlimited option—local calling only with the $30, and then long distance, texting, global texting, email, web access…you get the picture. You want something to sweeten the deal? First month free. No kidding. Still no contract. No credit checks. And, with most of those options, you can kind of pick and choose and add it on, making the plans totally customizable. You can even do a family plan. Also, there’s never an activation fee.
Why You Won’t: Poor service. Really poor. As in, literally centered around metropolitan areas in a very short list of places. If you’re in one of those places and don’t move around much, fantastic—you can take advantage of their great plans. If not, you’re out of luck, my friend. They also don’t have very applauded customer service—there are a lot of bashes online, but hey, they do have to be doing something right to get that JD Power award (which isn’t for customer service, but still). Another problem? Phone junkies should absolutely pass. Their selection isn’t poor, it’s the wrong side of ridiculous. At time of writing, they had four phones in stock and on offer. Four. They also charge taxes on long distance phone calls.
Local service is generally acceptable, and the price and terms are competitive. However, MetroPCS customer service is beyond appalling and approaching nonexistent. The phrase “gratuitously appalling” seems to be the way Texans handle the telecom biz in the current regulatory regime. Basically, if you are not calling to buy services or pay a bill, they don’t want to hear from you. Service reps operate from a script, the script is very time consuming to go through and will probably not answer your question. If you attempt to deviate from their script they are instructed to hang up. If customer requests a supervisor they are instructed to hang up. A simple matter of leaving Sacramento to go to Atlanta (both Metro covered areas), thus turns into a nightmare when seeking procedures and codes needed to”deactivate” then “reactivate” the phone in and out of those areas. Mostly the reps don’t know how, the rest of the time information is wrong, and those few who do figure it out take an extended amount of time to provide it. Travel, even to metro zones, is pretty much worthless unless (according to reps) you have these codes and follow an obscure procedure . With Metro take a phone card and hope to find a phone. Or do what I’m going to doing. After 4 years, even with infrequent travel, I’ve had enough and will be dumping Metro. That’s the price of poor customer relations Metro. Have a nice day, folks.
to the above comment… customer service does not use a script on the whole convo… onyl the greeting, outages, and closing of the calls… the rest of us is not scripted… and are NOT instructed to ahng up because your question doesnt fit with so called script…. now i really shouldnt say we as i dont work for the call center any longer as of this last friday… but the point being you have it all wrong… and if you know hwo to take advantage of metropcs policies it can be a great service…. just gotta know the loop holes like an employee does… bad thing is they dont have cov in call centers for them…. such as mine was in ohio
I bought a phone online, paid extra to have it sent second day, and 10 days later it never showed. I contacted them via email and they said ‘it had been lost in the mail’, although there was no tracking number ever generated. I was never offered another phone, no apology, nothing. AND, I had to do all of my communication via email, as customer service will not handle Internet orders. It was the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had with any company. I guess you get what you pay for.
I deal with Mark and Mike at the MetroPCS dealer on 42nd St and 9th Ave in Manhattan, and they are excellent.
I buy a phone. They activate it and make sure everything works. I walk out of the store talking on it.
Excellent.
And the call quality and signal strength is the best of any carrier I’ve ever used in New York City. MetroPCS is the ONLY carrier whose calls don’t drop on the elevator in my apartment building…. all the way up to the 25th floor… without dropping the call the entire time…
AT&T on my iPhone drops every call every 10 minutes…. even when I stand right at the window. AT&T so sucks. At $155 a month!
MetroPCS is $40 a month.
When leaving a metro Market. 1st dial *228 when automated voice come on dial 2. Room must be very noise free. Voice should say “update PRL list” (Most recent Roaming List” once it is successfully loaded go to your roaming options and select “automatic” not “metropcs” you should be able to freely go to different metro pcs cities this way. Metro now has travel talk add $10 to your metro connect and get about 52 minutes talk time in any market.
another thing the above post (June 26th, 2009 at 10:48 pm) didnt mention is if you dont have money in your metroconnect account you can still send and receive text free unlimited all day and night as long as you got a signal.
I have Verizon Wireless (family plan 4 lines for about $120 month for 1400 mins to share plus night and weekend). Now My wife wants to be able to check facebook and emails so was thinking about getting MetroPCS’s family unlimited (4 lines for $100). I am not sure what other taxes and fees are or how good their service is in Chino Hills and Chino area of California. I love Verizon service, but for web access they want $30 more per line that would add up quickly, so MetroPCS seems to be half of verizon so am thinking about it. Any advice will be appreciated.