Customers Are Treated Like Second-Class Citizens

Toss your hopes out of replacing your old  phones as  mobile companies continue to bolster their elitist positioning of "who gets to enjoy postpaid subscription", as the rest of the "diminutive" customers wait on for a lifetime  to be served an attitude of rejection, that is truly bereft of respect for the common consumers of mobile services

                                                                                        

 Heartless but still smart... when customers are shookt away from services when they are barren of documents.

                                                                                        

In a fit of denigrate treatment by a leading mobile services that paved the way for benchmark products in the country, the smart interconnectivity included, I bore witness to another demeaning treatment, as I tried my luck to have a postpaid line for the nth time with all chances whine and slim-worthy.

After waiting for two hours in line inside a mobile branch in SM Santa Rosa, one customer complained that she, along with another companion, had to wait for two hours just to deal with customer service to have their sim card queries related to the popular mobile company.

There were two staff who were quietly sitted at the corner of their chair.  In humdrum pace, they attended to different customers, mostly having problems with sim reactivation, sim activation etc. 

In another corner one customer jostled in a conversation when the male staff, he observed did not answer the customer's questions point blank, as if circumventing the conversation to dissuade the customer's concern.

I was one of the individuals  in queue and admittingly,  I was hoping I would get a postpaid subscription this time around, knowing that it is of the right circumstance to have continuous sim and data services already because of the recent spate of calamities that almost render my prepaid mobile services non-working when I need it.

Most of the banner and advertising fronted at the said branch displayed the latest expensive mobile devices, that I reserve not to name because everybody knows this "it" phone already.  

It is a device that requires an arm and a leg of an effort to pay for, so pricey at a time that most customer wallets are waning from purchase strength and tensility.

I scanned the sales brochures on their display table and browse over the different offer for postpaid services.

I quietly encircled the cheapest and the most affordable subscription plan because it is all that I want to afford and shell out for my needs.

Yes, I too had waited for two hours.   As one of the staff divulged, other staff took a "break" that honestly was long and felt more like laggardness to assist the customers in queue.

As expected, the front service personnel asked for documents that I hope would suffice by submitting my current credit card statement that remained new and unshared to other mobile companies.

After signing the required papers and documents, plus a tedious and really "awkward" process of having to share my email address, my bluetooth details in order to share my credit card statement for application approval, plus having to chat for a much delayed time with the mobile staff, I was told that they could only give me a "sim card" without a device, despite the brochure advertising they have prominently displayed on the table.

I argued of course because the postpaid was affordable enough to be purchased by an ordinary consumer and still I got the decline.

One customer braggartly yelled:  "ayan,  naiiyak na s'ya!",  (translation:  look, she is about to cry!",  when I got back in to hear about the news about the rejection of my postpaid mobile device and subscription application.  

As if the man, obviously delirious of his expensive mobile aptitude and capability to purchase, had all the rights to hyphenate my being a small-time consumer as  the two staff looked on with coldness.

I argued and complained but the supervisor curtly  explained  that if I have a complain, I just have to write it down.  

Being talked down by them,  which I hope was enough for their own workers' "egopleasure", as if I am an outcast of a consumer, I was "suggested" and "instructed" like without wits,  to write down my woes on a sheet of paper with a customer number specified, I  expected my complain to be futile as the paper would just be shelved and rusted away without compassion.

I knew from the very start that the "data sim card offer" was a mere "pampalubag loob" or a pittance of an offer to a lowly customer who cannot afford the 40 thousand  peso device because I relegated instead to a cheap device that they see as so lowly even I have no right to own it.

It is unspokenly the height of customers being categorized without conscience, as second-class citizens without having to say it out loud.

Perhaps, it is not the "child"  that is problematic with continued internet connectivity but the company rather  that is, deserving to be called "problematic" for its incapability to stay true to its word in advertising the cheap way for its "unbeloved cheap" customers.

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