EE going out of their way to prevent me becoming a customer

[speedbird193]

Hi, 

Just need to get this off my chest after having one of the most frustrating experiences as a potential customer I can remember.

My current mobile phone contract with another provider is coming to an end and after comparing different options I decided to go with a new iPhone 15 Pro Max and the EE Full Works plan with the BT broadband customer discount. Little did I know just how difficult EE would make it for me to actually become a customer, to the point where I quite frankly had enough and give up.

I spent all day yesterday trying to get my online shopping basket to work. Following the link from my BT account for the broadband customer discount to the EE shop, I either got a "Sorry, there was a problem with your basket" when selecting the only phone colour that was in stock, or I got through to the order page  when selecting the phones with a 14 day dispatch time but then somewhere along the line my BT discount disappeared and it reverted to the full price for the Full Works plan. I eventually figured out that the only way to get this to work was with Chrome on a laptop (no other browser worked, neither did it on my phone).

Today, I finally managed to put the in stock phone into my basket and keep the BT discount on the plan. I made it through the entire order process, passed all the credit and identity checks and finally got the final page where it asked me to input my credit card details to pay for the £30 deposit for the phone. At that stage, I realised that the BT discount on the plan had disappeared yet again and it was showing the full price for the plan again. I still had a separate tab open with the T&Cs and draft order details that were created earlier during the order and that was still correctly showing the discounted plan price. However, as I didn't want to confirm the order for the now incorrectly shown price, I didn't complete the order process and decided to go to an EE shop on the way back from work to sort it.

So far so good - I arrived at the EE shop and wasn't really helped at all. I explained the situation and the service agent quoted me nearly £30/month more for the package than the online BT offer and when I challenged the price he said that he can't do anything about that because they rolled out a new system in December he doesn't have access to so that's the best price he can offer me. I asked him what he would suggest to help me and his response was "I don't know, maybe call EE and they can look at it". Way to make a good impression on a potential customer.

When I got home I did call EE and after navigating through the number pressing maze to actually end up with Sales, I spoke to a friendly but ultimately powerless representative. He explained to me that the best he could offer me was also the much more expensive, undiscounted price but that there are 2 (!) representatives at EE that are trained in digital sales and one of them would call me back later to get this done for me. At least he was nice and tried.

A couple minutes later I did receive the call back from digital sales, and after speaking to the lady for 30 minutes, confirming personal details for most of that time with her actually identifying me through the number I was calling from and opening my BT profile from it, passing a credit check over the phone, providing my bank details and even confirming I was a BT customer by reading back to her the correct PIN she texted me via BT I was told that I didn't pass the final "identify test" asking me a dozen questions on various credit cards and bank accounts, some of which were closed years ago and so I couldn't become a customer unless I wanted a "low value handset". 

I'm still speechless and quite frankly angry at how ridiculous EE treats potential customers. I was willing to spend a lot of money each month on a high end handset and the Full Works plan, but after this experience I'm absolutely shocked how difficult that seemingly is and how inefficient and broken EE's systems and processes are. Considering that my BT broadband contract might eventually become EE in the future I'll even reconsider moving that somewhere else after this shambolic experience.

[Leanne_T]

Hi @speedbird193 

I am very sorry to hear of your experience when taking a new contract with us. 

I would suggest contacting our mobile guides again if you would like to discuss this further and see what can be done to get this sorted for you. 

Please see our Contact EE page for ways to contact us. 

Leanne.