I’ve been considering getting a Tracfone. I’m fine with the equipment and plan, in fact was ready to go for it - until I read a bunch of reviews. They seem pretty evenly divided between those who are happy with what they got, and those who have had significant problems, some of whom hate the company with notable intensity.
What worries me about the negative reviews is how egregiously poor the service is and an apparent attitude of the company not caring one whit about treating customers fairly. The latter bothers me the most.
With the quaint hope that they might have cleaned up their act recently, I ask for anyone’s experience with Tracfone during the last six months.
I have a tracfone. In this area, SW Wisconsin, it goes through US Cellular which has the best reception so that part is good. Find out what carrier they use in your area before you decide.
Customer service OK , but taken care of by some overseas phone answering company. I have called twice, both times to switch phones. Be prepared to listen very carefully because the people on the other end can barely speak English. I don’t think I would have been able to understand them if we had to actually have a conversation. The conversations were mostly them reading numbers for me to enter into my phone.
Really though, how much customer service would you need? This isn’t a phone plan that works for anyone needing complicated phone service. If something gets so messed up you can’t use your phone and they can’t take care of it you can just buy a new phone for 20 bucks and start over.
I have one. I like it, although I have not had to deal with customer service. I rarely use the phone at all, but when I have needed it it worked. It is likely true that the vast majority of users make only occasional use of it, otherwise (as Common Tater said), it would get expensive fast.
I have had one for about three years, and use it very infrequently. The one time I did have to call customer service, the person who I spoke to probably was in India, but she was perfectly competent and we took care of what we needed to take care of. Otherwise I buy time, etc., online, no biggie.
From what I’ve read, a number of people have gotten shorted on the minutes they’ve purchased. Exactly why isn’t clear (or even known), but it’s a repeated complaint. From their reports, customer service often fails to rectify this, with responses ranging from “there’s nothing we can do” to “you’re lying.” This is my main concern.
Although I don’t have a Tracfone, I do have a prepaid phone. I’ll make about 9 or 10 calls per week, averaging just over 1 minute per call, and pay only about $16 per month including taxes. That easily beats the $30 (+ tax) monthly plan that I can get for a contract service. I don’t try to restrict the number of calls I make, it’s just that my usual use of the phone doesn’t really cost that much. If I have to make the occasional 20 minute call, it’s still cheaper for me.
It depends on what a ‘constant, regular basis’ is to Gary T. Starting with a prepaid service is a good way to go, if he starts with that he can always dump it if a 1 or 2 year contract service is cheaper. If he doesn’t talk on the phone like a teenager, then it will probably work for him.
I have had this happen to me before. I have also had the dreaded double billing. Trying to get that corrected required me to be rerouted through four different departments before they finally gave me someone who could fix the problem. I don’t know if it was a miscommunication problem (as others have said, it was a vdery foreign operation and no one spoke English very well) or if they were jerking me around trying to keep double the money.
Of course, this is all contigent on their credit card processing page actually working. Half the time it isn’t working when I try to add time and I have to try again the next day.
I forgot about it and my Tracfone lapsed just the other day. I lost my number (I liked my number), but it’s for the best.
I can think of four customer fault reasons for this. (Not saying it IS the customer’s fault, but there are common mistakes customers make.)
Each fraction of a minute is paid as a whole minute. People don’t seem to get that even though the phone acknowledges the call was 20 seconds, they lose a whole minute of their time.
With Tracfone, you have to keep up both your minutes AND your expiration date. Even if you have 100 minutes, you need to add another card before the expiration date on your phone. If you don’t, I believe, you lose those minutes. If you keep it from expiring, the minutes accrue.
People lie. Sorry, that’s the truth. For every 10 complaints I got as a manager in retail, 8 of them were total fabrications. People would tell me they spoke to employees three weeks ago and sorted it all out, and even point the employee the dealt with out to me - an employee who had been hired last week. :smack:
People also make honest mistakes, and then refuse to acknowledge them: Return a Blockbuster movie to Hollywood Video and never, ever admit it, even when I was myself standing at the Hollywood Video counter accepting my store’s tape from the clerk - they would still lie and lie and lie and say they had no idea how it got there. Or, “I returned that, I remember it specifically, because I was on my way to the hospital to visit my pet parakeet recovering from gall bladder surgery after my son’s graduation!” - and when, four weeks later, they found the tape under their couch? Dropped in the return box without a word.
It’s also possible, of course, that people are returning cards to the store after using them, so they don’t have the minutes on them the person thinks they do, or that people are selling counterfeit cards. It’s also possible that Tracfone has screwed up repeatedly. But my retail experience, and Occam’s Razor, tell me it’s usually a misunderstanding of the procedure or the customer’s need to be right that causes these situations.
I’m getting three Tracfones this week, by the way. They have a family plan where I can keep three emergency phones (one for me, my husband and my son) active for around $20 a month - less than I’m shelling out to Virgin, with cheaper replacement phones should my waterbottle come open in the diaper bag again and soak another phone. :smack:
Granted, but the incidents I read about don’t appear to fall into this category. They’re talking about buying a card clearly labeled X minutes and having only half of those minutes show after activating the card, or having 100 minutes disappear suddenly (with no service lapse), or in at least one case a significant number of minutes consumed when the phone wouldn’t work at all - and they knew that, because they were working on the “doesn’t work” problem at the time (and even that took weeks!) The process for dealing with these problems was as Justin_Bailey described, but not always with a happy ending. Sometimes the company acknolwedged fault and promised to rectify the situation, but never followed through.
Now, I’m taking these internet reviews at face value. Maybe some of them are lying, or forgot something important. But the number of repeated types of complaints, and of the horror stories in trying to solve the problems, suggest that they can’t all be “customer fault” scenarios.
Woohoo!
I love my TracFone and have no interest in ever going to a regular cellphone. Advantages I like:
I don’t have to pay a monthly fee.
I have a whole year to fill up minutes.
It’s a bare-bones phone, and I don’t want anything fancy in it.
It costs the same wherever I call*, and since 90% of my cell phone calls are long distance (it’s why I got the damn thing) it works great for me.
The minutes are easy to refill. And the best thing to do is wait until you get a deal. Last year my SO got a 2-for-1 deal and some other deals and ended up getting like 800 minutes for really cheap.
I have a year and more to refill before my minimal contract expires. Right now I have 192 minutes and I don’t need to refill until June 2008.
They don’t bug me or call me or irritate me to buy more. Occasionally they’ll e-mail me to tell me of deals. But basically I don’t hear from them unless I want to.
I can text, and texting costs less than a minute. I’m finding it’s useful for things like “call me at home”.
Disadvantages:
No unlimited minutes.
I don’t have VM. That’s fine by me. I don’t even know if it’s an option.
Limited selection of phones. Also fine by me.
Any questions?
ETA: Oh yeah, and I have never ever had any problem with not getting the minutes I need. i fill online, and I’ve had it about 3 years now. Actually, right around 3.5 I think.
I also have a Tracfone. I have never had any issues with it. Buying minutes online used to be very annoying, because you had to type in a ridiculous amount of confirmation numbers, but they’ve basically done away with now. The phone gets good reception in every location I’ve ever been in–from my place in the sticks to Arizona. Long distance calls use the same amount of minutes as local calls and there is no such thing as roaming. When I was doing an archaeological field school in the distant mountains of Arizona, my phone got the best reception.
Nowadays I use my phone a lot more than I used to, and it’s not working so well. It’s expensive, and also annoying, because I have to go to the site all the time and refill the minutes. But that’s because I’ve changed my phone habits.
I have never needed to call customer service, so I can’t say anything about that.
PS: Tracfone gave me 30 extra minutes last time I bought 'em (they have a lot of various kinds of deals). I have certainly never had any problems with giving me FEWER minutes than expected.
Are Tracfone (or any other prepaid phone) phone numbers portable? That’s always been one of the things that has kept me away from them. I’ve had my current phone number for over 7 years now. People know it. I took it with me when I changed phones and I could talk it to another provider. Are prepaid phone users SOL when it comes to any kinds of changes, and keeping their phone numbers?
Not entirely true. In a place where there are no cell towers or where the towers are blocked by mountains, it’s considered roaming. It’s really kind of bizarre - when I went to Vegas or L.A. my phone worked just fine, but two hours south of my home there is a cell-phone dead zone - all the cells quit working - and mine said roaming.
As for changing the number, I have no idea…this is still my first cell phone. I’m 31, but I’ve been reluctant.
I recently bought a Motorola V170 Tracfone for $30, it has voice mail. I think it’s based on the phone you have.
Tracfones seem to be a really good deal for an infrequent cell phone talker. Here’s my formula for Tracfone success:
-Buy the Tracfone, cost varies from $10 to $50 or more.
-Buy a Double Minutes card for $50. This DOUBLES all future minutes you buy for your Tracfone and really makes it a good deal. I’m not sure they’ll continue selling those cards forever, some accountant will tel them it’s killing their bottom line.
-Buy a minutes card. You can get 60 minute ones on eBay for $12, 120 minutes for $24, or 200 minutes for $40. But remember, you get double the minutes, so a 60 min card gives you 120 minutes, 200 min card gives you 400, etc.
-Add your minutes through the Tracfone.com website and use promo codes like these: Tracfone promotional code - Trac fone With these codes you can get up to 60 extra free minutes when you add airtime.
I went with a $30 V170 phone, $50 double minutes card, and $40 200 minute card, total investment $120. Using the doubler I now have 460 minutes and cell phone service until November (initial 60 days of service plus another 90 days when you add an airtime card.) So that’s $24 a month for cell phone service (including the phone!) and I can talk 90 minutes a month on average.
When I add future 200 (x 2 = 400) minute cards, the numbers are even better, $40 will give me 3 months of service at $13.33 per month, and I can talk 133 minutes a month.
On the down side, the V170 flip phone is cheap with a small screen, and the battery life is terrible (it was down to 1/3 charge after one day of mostly just being on.) But a new battery will probably help a lot and is only $7.
But overall it’s hard to beat the Tracfone deal if you play the game right. And no contracts!
Yes, was this asterisk leading to a caveat? We’re getting these for customer support locally but I’m curious about them. Did you decline voicemail or was it not an option? Unfortunately we have to have voice mail to allow customers to leave their problems. :smack:
If you go to the Tracfone site and click on the “Switching to Tracfone” link, it tells you all about how to “port” an existing number to Tracfone.
Another satisfied Tracfone user here. I’m on my second phone, and both times I’ve done the “buy a 60-minute airtime card for $19.95 and get a reconditioned phone for free.” Great deal.
Lately, I’ve been buying my minutes off eBay ($12-15 for 60 min. instead of $20).
