The single worst customer care experience of my life, Ft. Mint Mobile
Over the past 24 hours, I have spoken to 10 different mint agents. 🫠
Context: I recently got a new phone and, since I was using Mint with a physical SIM, I decided to switch to an eSIM. During the process, Mint said they sent an activation email, but I never received anything. At the same time, the eSIM process deactivated my physical SIM, leaving me with no service at all.
Issue: When I contacted customer support, they initially couldn’t even locate my account. After some digging, they found that my account existed without a first name, last name, or email attached. I am not sure how their backend allowed for an account to exist, which makes their their claim of 'security' bs, as you will read later. Anyway, the rep guided me to update my name, but when we got to the email, it required a verification code sent to my phone, which I couldn’t access because my SIM was already deactivated.
"The Care": The above led to a cycle of 9 calls with different agents. Each call started with me verifying my identity (I think I might have memorized my IMEI by now). This was followed by some "verification" questions for whatever they were verifying, a couple of holds, partial troubleshooting, and then in the end I was told that I would get a call back within 1/2/5/10/20 mins or 1hr. I did not receive callbacks for most, and when I did, half of them were outrageously outside the timeframe they indicated. As a result, whenever I had to callback myself, there was no continuity between agents, and I had to restart the entire process every time.
"All they could do": On the ninth call, I was told they were unable to verify my identity and that I would have to wait 30 days before trying again for 'security reasons'. This effectively meant I would be without service for a month, with no workaround, no temporary SIM, and no alternative solution, despite having already paid for the plan. Awesome!
Resolution: On my tenth call, I finally reached a care supervisor who understood the situation immediately. They said the same thing about the 30-day thing. I was pretty agitated at this point and decided I was done, and asked for a cancellation and refund for the remaining time on my plan. Initially, this was denied, but after pushing further, they requested it as a one-time exception. I’m currently waiting on the refund confirmation. I would give them a shoutout if someone from Mint DMs me :)
The biggest downside now is that I will likely lose my current phone number, which I really wanted to keep, as everything is linked to it, and would have to wait whatever time for the new number. Any porting also requires waiting for the 30-day (business) period. Given the experience, I have 0 confidence that even after 30 days of waiting their verification process would work.
I actually like(d) Mint for its pricing and had generally acceptable service. But if there is one thing I would want to avoid doing rn, its to deal with mint customer care ever again in my life.