Refilling my prepaid fido account…not!

I’m fond of saying that I’m the last consultant in the world without a cell phone.   While that is true for business, my partner and I have one that we use for personal purposes.   And because we use it so infrequently (mostly for emergencies or urban logistics when we’re in the big city) we have it hooked on to a prepaid plan from fido.

Now fido offers you a couple of ways to handle prepayment.   You can either buy vouchers or use a credit card.   A credit card is preferable for us.   So because we are running low on our initial minutes, we called the handy prepayment number to refill our prepaid account …or not.

This evening we have been stuck in voice mail jail trying to register to have our fido mobile phone account refilled by Visa.   It has taken quite a while and we still haven’t gotten any help.   Here’s what happens:

1. Dial 611 (or *46 or any of the other numbers fido says to call…they all take you to the same robot.   She says her name is “Andrea.”   Nice.)
2. Follow the robot’s directions patiently to register for instant prepayment, so that we can use our credit card to refill.   Optionally don’t be patient and just say “representative” into the phone.   It will take you to the same place anyway.
3. One of two things will happen.   You might get an English speaking representative who will tell you politely that he can’t do this manually, and that you have to speak to the robot about it.   If this happens, the robot takes you through the same logic chain that delivers you into the lap of an English speaking representative, who will breezily deny that this reality even happened.   We had several very nice young people speak with us this evening, and we think we actually even witnessed a shift change down at the old call centre.
4. Once in a while Andrea will not direct you to a friendly but useless English speaking representative, but instead will forward you to another robot who, in French, politely informs you that the French customer service office is now closed and will reopen at 8am.   She then terminates the call, leaving you flummoxed and with no recourse but to blog the whole experience.

So that’s it.   If anyone can help us figure out how to get credit card refilling authorized and then done, that would be nice.   If you fido guys are reading this, give us a call, but don’t mince your words, we only have two precious minutes remaining in our account!.   Your robot has the number.   Her name is Andrea.
In the meantime I guess we’re thinking about switching to Telus or something. The bottom line for fido: crap customer services trumps friendly robots.   The French twist on the whole thing was pretty funny though, so the evening’s entertainment was not a total loss.

[tags]fido, bad+customer+service, voice+mail, cell+phone, help![/tags]