Phone CSRs can do more than the folks at T-Mobile stores can these days. The stores mostly exist for retail sales. I presume this also applies to VZW and T.
Yeah, the store employees fundamentally don’t seem to have any more permissions in the system than a customer. They often can’t do more than call the help desk on your behalf.
My impression is that the stores hire ambitious but naive young people with promises of sales commissions, and in reality they’re mostly stuck sitting on hold for frustrated customers
Went to shiT-Mobile in store. Only two employees working, one preoccupied with a customer that apparently is months late on their bill and demanding to be let back in, and was presenting a expired ID. The second one was a couple which based on their conversations and look, were replacing the phone lines for their mafia crime family.
Had a 1 hour wait to basically do a 2 minute fucking ESIM swap. No, fuck that.
From your judgements against the other clients as well as the staff, might this be a case of "if you meet a bastard in the morning, you met a bastard. If you met nothing but bastards all day...?"
No, not really, the clients sound like they have some issues that are inhibiting their functioning and are actually in somewhat of a crisis moment. The staff seem under-resourced and are probably being underpaid.
I can tell you, my friendly neighborhood Verizon store isn't any better. I used to not mind the higher price when you got better customer service when you needed it. Now everything is a race to the bottom and nobody seems to try/care.
Worse is when insurance misclassified a billing response from the hospital/provider and trying to go back and forth to fix it was agony. Of course the skeptic in me feels it may have been by design. It wasn't until the second time I manage to get a hospital and insurance rep on the phone at the same time that things got resolved... hah, can't play phone tag now bitches, you're both here.
Last time I had an issue with my internet I went into the Xfinity/Comcast store, they had reps with nothing to do and someone immediately helped me, they seem to have direct access to management systems that are not available to the customers on the website or via the app. Talking to a human to describe the problem is so much easier than dealing with a bot or voice-response system.
