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The Telecom War: A Customer’s Point of View regarding Jordanian telecom providers

September 15th, 2010

Like 2/3 of Jordanians, I own lines from 3 different mobile providers: Orange, Zain & Umniah.

Telecom in Jordan is bombarded with competitive prices and services, with some of the best services and prices across the levant. But, when It comes to customer service and pricing… services are really different.

Orange Jordan provides the best coverage with 3G+ services, while lacks great offers or customer service and by that I also include social media activity, even with their recently launched twitter service, a reply to them or a tweet takes them 2-3 days to to reply to a simple question… Also, the employees who don’t know what they’re selling is another failure… Like many of you probably know, the recent Apple inventions such as the iPad and iPhone require microSIMs.

A solution was to cut the regular 3G SIM cards and make them smaller to fit in, while many telecoms worldwide introduced the microSIMs, I called Orange in Jordan and was left on hold for 3 minutes, so I gave up with that, I went to their branch and the employee was replying to me as If I was making fun of him or joking… I gave up until a friend told me they do have them, and he showed me his.

I went to the Mecca Mall branch, asked for it… yet the employee didn’t take me seriously! until I asked to speak to his boss, which said “yes, we do have them”, The employee was shocked and in denial, didn’t apologize for his rude attitude and his reply was “I didn’t know we had such things”… WOW, so now I know more than an insider?

Also, the facebook campaign is too weak, the giveaways and the live polls… They could be at least done on their website servers not their agencies’ and with better elements and less complicated designs.

So this is it with Orange, you can’t solve anything unless you do it in person!

Zain Jordan on the other side, doesn’t have 3G services yet but after reporting your problems, their customer service showed huge improvement since June. They listen now, one example is also me canceling a subscription, I had a line which I paid off and deactivated but kept getting bills for 2 months although I didn’t even have a SIM card to use, I broke it when I canceled the subscription. I called their customer service but It wasn’t really helpful, so I decided to reply to their Twitter, which is active all the time! I tweeted my issue at 4 am and got a call by 9 am! WOW, they asked for the bills and some details, the next day they called me thanking me for reporting and canceled the bills. I was impressed, also some people mentioned ideas and suggestions regarding their Blackberry service and it was added, like end of service date notifications. I can say, I turned from a hater into an appreciator just for that fact.

Umniah Jordan has also some good things, like being the sole provider of facebook text service but this is where it ends, they have a bad design, weak advertising and lousy social media activity, very unprofessional and immature regarding even replying to customers or irrelevant tweeting.

This is based on experience with all examples. So Kudus Zain for making me like you more while I never wanted to.