Seeing Orange

This is N hijacking Jess’s blog. Apparently, I need to hit some kind of frustration threshold before I’m inspired to write anything.

My mobile phone provider, Orange, has recently made The List, in company with such French greats as banking and taxis. Yes, I realize that nobody loves their mobile phone provider back in the U.S. either, but what has transpired recently with Orange is definitely an order of magnitude more insufferable than the tales of woe I’ve heard from U.S. consumers, which generally seem to revolve around dropped calls and/or poor reception.

Any discussion of mobile phone service in France must begin with the discrepancy in cost between mobile phone services in the U.S. versus France. I was going to ballpark this part, but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to get factual by looking up figures on the websites of Orange and AT&T. The results are shocking. Looking at comparable, fairly low-end calling plans at each site, I found that Orange’s cost per minute of talk time (about $0.51) is fifty times higher than AT&T ($0.01)! To be fair, I summed up AT&T’s 5000 nights and weekend minutes as well as the 450 minutes of peak talk time, but even when you exclude the nights and weekend minutes Orange is still nine times more expensive. Orange basically gives you two hours of talk time for $60, although you do get unlimited calls to three numbers. Anyway, you might chalk this up to the higher cost of living in France, until you consider that broadband/cable TV/VOIP telephony is available as a package for about $50, and the Internet is roughly 15 times faster than the speeds that are readily/affordably available in the U.S. (16 Mbps at my place!)

All this is a prelude to my iPhone story. When the iPhone 3G was announced, I decided to finally cave in and get it, having held out on the first generation. Orange, like AT&T in the U.S., is the exclusive iPhone carrier. Luckily for me, or so I thought, I was already an Orange subscriber. Thus, I was surprised to learn when I went to the Orange store to get the iPhone that I had not accumulated enough “points”, and so the iPhone would cost me about $600, versus the $300 advertised price (converting roughly from Euros here). However, they did inform me that if I were to cancel my current subscription, and join as a new customer, they could offer me the $300 price since I’d be a new customer acquisition that way. Go figure. The catch was that since I would be cancelling my subscription before my full year was up, I’d have to pay the remaining two months of subscription.

At this point, before having purchased the actual phone, I mentioned that I might be relocating out of the country soon, and asked whether I’d be able to take the phone with me and cancel my new subscription without any penalties. I would of course have not gotten the phone if the answer hadn’t been “oh sure, no problem.” I think there’s a law that prevents providers from charging cancellation fees in the event of an international move. In any case, they repeatedly told both Jess and I (in separate stores) that it would not be an issue. So we went ahead with it.

Fast forward four months – Jess and I are leaving the country soon. I begin the process of notifying Orange that I need to cancel my service due to the fact that we are leaving. During the half dozen attempts to reach the cancellation department at Orange over the course of a week, I experienced a distinct pattern of neglectful customer service which was, in fact, entirely circular, much like a mobius strip. It went like this:



Call
Navigate byzantine menu tree to indicate to the system that I am interested in cancelling my subscription
Wait on hold
Customer Service rep responds who has not been informed that I would like to cancel my subscription
Verbal explanation to CS rep that I would like to cancel my subscription
CS rep asks for my identifying information
CS rep then tells me that he actually can’t execute the cancellation, and that I need to speak with the cancellation department, which he puts me through to
Wait on hold
CS rep comes back on to tell me that the cancellation department is so busy (surprise surprise) that they can’t answer the phone, and to try back later
This happened over and over. I suppose denying your customers the ability to cancel your service can be called a retention strategy.

Eventually, I managed to speak with a cancellation rep and explained to him that I needed to cancel my service, as well as “unlock” my iPhone so it will work on other networks. Without the unlock, the phone would be useless back in the U.S. The rep informs me that the unlock will cost $150, since I have had the phone for less than six months, although this fee was never mentioned by the people who sold us the phones and told us it would be “no problem”. However, this is actually fair, since Orange heavily subsidizes the cost of the phone in exchange for a 1 or 2 year commitment by the customer, and we have only had the phone for three or four months. So I agreed to the fee, and told him to go ahead with the unlocking procedure, which actually needs to go through Apple. The rep informs me that all that is left for me to do is to send a letter requesting the cancellation along with proof of my employment abroad. Jess and I duly send in these letters, thinking that would be that.

A week later I get a voice message from an Orange cancellation rep. Apparently, they “just” need us to go into the Orange store where we purchased our phones (yes, the specific stores) and return the units. Upon handing in the phones we’ve now spent $450 each on, not counting monthly service fees of course, our accounts will be cancelled. All this after Jess and I were told, separately, on multiple non-consecutive occasions, that cancelling our service and unlocking our phone to take the abroad would be “no problem.”

Needless to say, I’m super displeased with Orange right now. However, this frustration does not compare with the prospects of again attempting to reach Orange’s customer support reps to set all of this straight.