More Phone Frustrations

This time, it was T-Mobile. I went online to t-mobile.com in order to check my cell phone's balance. The screen has a section for the minutes balance and for the dollar amount balance. The minutes was listed as "0" while the dollar amount balance was correct.

I called customer support in order to ask why my minutes balance was 0. First, getting a live voice on the phone was difficult. Pressing 0 simply errored, the automated voice did NOT want to give me up to a live person. I finally figured out to answer the questions incorrectly three times in a row so that it would get confused and would be forced to transfer me to live person.

The first live person was happy to give me my balance in minutes. He didn't understand that what I was calling about was an issue with the online site. Finally got him to understand and he transferred me to Trenton, part of the the "Technical Support" group. Unfortunately, this was technical support for the phone itself and not for the online site. So, he struggled to understand what the problem was. I finally had him log in to my account and look at it online from his end (they have a backdoor way of looking at any customer's account). Once I pointed out that the "minutes" section read "0," he understood and transferred me to a third person. This person was in Technical Support for the online services, was in India, and had her head up her ass.

I kept telling her that my ONLINE minutes balance was listed as ZERO. She kept telling me that I simply had to dial pound-number-number-number-pound in order to get my balance. I said, "How will that help me to see the proper balance online?" She responded with, "It will give you the proper balance." It took me over 10 minutes of explaining it a bunch of different ways before I got her to understand that I KNEW I could get my balance other ways, but that I was using their online site and it was wrong.

Then she tried to blame it on "we're currently performing an online update." Yeah, right. Every single time I've called any company with an online issue of a similar nature, they try to blame it on an update. Apparently all companies are performing online updates 24/7, so don't rely on their sites. Or I'm just lucky enough that, no matter when I go online, the company I'm visiting just happens to have that time scheduled for their updates. I badgered her on this until I finally got her to escalate the issue to a supervisor.

I then asked if I could give her my home phone number so that the supervisor could contact me when the problem was resolved. "Oh, no, sir, we're not allowed to call customers."

"Well, then, how will I know when this issue is resolved?" I asked.

"You can call in after 24 hours and check on the ticket..."

"No. YOU have the information. YOUR company knows when this will be resolved. I do NOT want to start calling in once a day HOPING the problem is resolved, having to go through your awful phone system, being transferred a half dozen times, only to find out it is not resolved. Your supervisor can contact ME. How about sending me an email, if he's not allowed to call?"

"Well, I guess that might be all right," she said, and took down my public email address.

Now, I have little to no hope that I will actually get an email when this problem is resolved. It's the principle of the matter. If the company has all of the information, they should contact me when it is resolved, not the other way around.

Why do phone companies make dealing with them so difficult?

Here's how I envisioned the phone call going:

Me: When I log into my account online, the website shows my "minutes" as zero. When you check my account, you'll see that I have $95.11 balance and a ton of minutes. Why is the online site incorrectly showing my minutes balance as zero?
Them: Let me log into your account. Hmmm, yes, you're right. I see that it is showing zero even tho you have 950 minutes left on your balance. Let me forward this request to the proper department so they know about this error and they can correct it. Is there anything else today?
Me: No. Thank you. (See, at this point, I have done what I wanted to do [inform them of the error on the website] and do not need to have them contact me back when the problem is resolved. I assume they will take care of it.)

Is this too much to ask?