A bottle of champagne? Did their customer service make you smile?
The best I can think of is when BT phoned to double my data before my contract ended. Yep, it was a “dark pattern” to keep me paying, but it was something!
So what was yours? We’ll get into worst experiences another time… 
At the risk of sounding negative, I’ve never had any good experience with mobile network customer service. They were all as useless and incompetent as the last one.
I hope Zevvle will have a UK ONLY customer service and won’t use scripts at all.
I have managed Call Centers, I’m an Operations Manager (in IT, but same applies) and the biggest mistake companies make when they open their call center is to write scripts for agents to “standardize answers”. That clearly DOES NOT work. It has never worked and never will for the simple reason that you can’t have a script for every situation. When the agent doesn’t find their relevant script, they either lie, give innacurate answers or promise thinks they just can’t deliver to get rid of the customer.
A second free advice is to treat your customer agents well. Respect them, train them well and pay them well!
I can assure you that the investment you’ll put in your agents will be rewarded by the faithfullness of both your customers and your employees. Turnover in call centers is awful and companies spend tens of thousands of pounds in training because they have new agents all the time. Trainings during which agents are not working but paid!
Nowadays, all network offer pretty much the same but what customers really want, is to know for sure that they can count on the customer service to fix issues when time comes.
I recently switched to Smarty and haven’t yet had cause to complain. Does that count as positive?
Thank you for your thoughts, that’s good to know from someone who’s done it 
English as a main language absolutely. Having people ±8 hours (west coast America, Hong Kong, Australia) would be great as night shifts are mighty unsociable… And might as well use a chat bot if you’re relying on scripts!
I mean, no negatives is a great thing! Making it delightful would be step 2…
Probably giving me a discount on my monthly bill when the network goes down (although I realise this isn’t classed as “best experience” 
).
Overall though I’ve never had to make a complaint, support has generally been good! But that doesn’t mean the process couldn’t have been even smoother / more efficient .
When it was down, they were poor in updating me with any changes in ETA.
How a service deals with its mistakes can totally shape how people think of them. A fuck up dealt with well beats any marketing 
I remember topping up £15, sending a text and then going to buy all you can eat bundle … £14.90. I’m an idiot I thought. I phoned up and got £1 extra credit. That was a nice experience!
My experience was a little cheeky. I was happy with my SIM only contract but I wasn’t happy that I was supposed to have a loyalty/renewal bonus. The same price was offered to new customers, bearing in mind the price was only lowered maximum 2 months after my contract started.
So I called up and spoke to customer services who then passed my issue to the complaints team. They very nicely called me back the next day. They said I could cancel for no penalty as my contract was still relatively new or I could have 2 pound off my bill, at the very least until it was time to renew my contact.
I also called them up for a signal problem I’ve been having. At that time they had a unlimited everything SIM offer for the same price I was paying, so I convinced them to switch me to that plan. Not sure how that helped my signal but I guess that’s a problem for another time!
I had a similar experience on a Vodafone Pay&Go, phoned up for a totally irrelevant question about bundle renewal and asked for the top-up link as I couldn’t easily find it on their site; the CS advisor gave me the missing credit for free so the bundle would renew without having to top-up.
Still ended up topping up (I usually leave 50£ in there or so at all times to make sure the device doesn’t get cut off at the worst possible time) but it was a nice gesture.
Their online top up page is also good, just enter the number and pay by card. No need to create an account or even be using the device you’re topping up (especially useful when the SIM is in a device in the field and you have no access to it).
This is a great idea, I can see us doing the same!
That’s how it should be done.
Also, just to make sure, there will be automatic card payments right? I like the fact it can be a prepaid account but I also want auto top-ups every time the balance gets low (sadly none of the networks do it - best I could find is EE and even then they only allow you to top-up on a schedule, but not if you run out of credit early).
Absolutely! It’ll start with a monthly recurring, then add custom “rules” shortly thereafter; top up £X when my balance reaches £Y, etc. As little friction as possible
EDIT: down the line we could even do post-pay, subject to a credit check. There’re just more regulatory hoops to jump through with what’s effectively an unsecured loan…
Just keep it prepaid with auto top-up if balance drops to zero. It essentially makes it postpaid without any of the issues regarding people not paying (and protects them for spending more than they can afford), and also don’t have to deal with CRAs aka scammers.
1pmobile has the option to auto topup when your balance goes below £2, or the credit is about to expire. The auto topup will happen a maximum of once per day: https://www.1pmobile.com/faqs.taf?cat=03
So they do! Thinking v1 of that will be similar (“top up £X when my balance reaches £1 or £2*”), but maybe completely customising it would be useful; top up £X when it balance hits £Y, or top up £X every Y days, or on a certain day… maybe the latter could help ‘budget’ usage in a sense.
The top up when x balance reaches y is the simplest form. One key thing is preventing runaway usage and repeatedly taking more and more money from someone’s account. I’m thinking someone suddenly using more usage e.g. by faulty software update process repeatedly downloading a big update (I’ve heard it happen, luckily not to me).
Without bundles I reckon the budget option would need an upper bound too, so don’t top up if my balance is double my top up amount thus preventing the balance from getting too high and causing the need to be able to issue refunds or so. There’ll need to be someway to show: “balance too high to top up, so no payment taken”, to prevent support requests of why the top up wasn’t taken. I rather like this idea though.
That’s got me thinking, most PAYG operators will require you to run down your balance as they don’t do refunds of the balance (unless they are winding down or other exceptional circumstances), will you be the same?
Excellent point 
software is never perfect (but we’ll definitely try). We’ll stick with that simple form to start with, otherwise it could get more complex than necessary… although a monthly upper-limit could be useful.
I’m struggling to think of a reason for not doing refunds, so unless something detrimental shows up; no, we won’t be the same. One of my pet peeves is companies happily taking payments immediately but getting stingy when the tables are turned…
I would say required, to prevent a huge backlash if there is a runaway process repeatedly topping up. It’s about software outside of your control, or a phone being stolen and abused with essentially a blank cheque. Without some form of upper bound on the auto top up, I won’t signup for it, as there needs to be some safeguard to my bank account being emptied.
Good to hear.