T-Mobile recently angered thousands of long-term customers last month when they implemented price increases for a variety of legacy plans. The price increases were typically $5 per voice line and $2 per non-voice line (like tablets and watches).
Many customers think T-Mobile violated their agreement to never raise prices as part of the Price Lock guarantee. The original promise was that T-Mobile would never raise rates for price-locked customers, but in the end it seems only the fine print mattered, where T-Mobile promised to pay the last month’s bill if you wanted to leave due to a price increase.
As recently reported by Ars Technica, the FCC has apparently received over 1,600 complaints about the price increases at T-Mobile, with an unknown number of complaints also sent to the FTC. Time will tell if either of these organizations decide to do an investigation into the matter. T-Mobile certainly isn’t willing to negotiate with customers, and has a boilerplate letter they’re sending to those that complain.
There are also complaints that T-Mobile is refusing to honor even the final month’s bill clause as well, using excuses like “the customer didn’t contact us at the right time”.
Well, hilariously, even T-Mobile’s own internal ChatGPT-style chat bot, which is available to employees nationwide, says that Price Locked plans, including ones covered by the Un-Contract promise (more on that in a bit), are protected from price increases.
The bot even goes so far as to suggest the company could “face legal issues” for violating the Price Lock. It details specifically that the company could be in breach of contract or be violating consumer protections. It then, amusingly, goes on to say that violating Price Lock could affect their reputation, too. Surely not!
A big thing to note here is that the bot included “Un-Contract Promise” in the list of plans that would be protected. This particular promise comes from the era of the ONE plan, and was a sort of precursor to the modern Price Lock. Notably, many customers that are on the ONE plan were hit with price increases.
Of course, this is an AI chat bot using the same kinds of systems that ChatGPT and other online AI chat software is using. That means it’s prone to errors and obviously things it says can’t be taken as pure fact. That being said, the bot does have access to internal documentation to base its answers on, so is it really that far off?
Needless to say, this is more of an amusing situation than it is a “gotcha” moment for T-Mobile. We also don’t have the prompts used by the employee, though we trust our source to not have been trickily crafting them. Still, it’s pretty telling when even an automated system thinks the Price Lock is bogus.
