Since there are no review sites for products and services in Jamaica, I’ll just rant about my little problem on my blog in the hopes of saving potential customers from getting ripped off. This review is based on northern St. Elizabeth location for Claro Internet Service . They claim they do not do refunds if you get a service, even if your service is crap.
Review: Rating based out of 5.
- Product Service – 2.
- Customer Service – 0. (Cust Serv is a complete joke).
- Setting up – 5. (They make no joke in collecting your money and sign you up).
My Rant
I was informed by claro representatives at 2 different resellers and customer service that in my location, EDGE is available. I bought a claro modem with 1 month’s internet service, brought it to my area in which I indeed have EDGE. So before I get into the technical aspects of my rant, I’ll give a little lesson on the technologies I am working with:
There are multiple types of data transfers that Claro offers. Their best type is 3G. In my location I have GPRS and EDGE. These are the speeds that these 2 data transfer should give from this network:
- GPRS – 7kbps down.
- EDGE – around 25kbps down.
Now back to my rant. The modem frequently switches back and forth between GPRS and EDGE, but most of the time, it stays on EDGE. When on EDGE, I get a maximum down rate of 2kbps. Yep 2kbps of the 25kbps of what I should be getting. When it switches to GPRS, I get a maximum down rate of 7kbps. So here we have it, the lower performing service is out performing the better service.
I waiting a day or two before contacting customer service, they turned out to be very nice people who understood my problem very inefficiently and auto responded with “We are aware, technicians are working on the problem”. So after a few calls to their customer care service, I gave up and turned to a governmental organization called Consumer Affairs Commision. This very nice lady was assigned to my problem, she contacted Mr. Randolph Nelson (Customer Service Manager from Claro).
Mr. Nelson along with a technician tried to temporarily fix the service on GPRS until they fix the cell site in the area so EDGE would work properly. Weeks passed, each time of contact, telling me that they have not visited the cell site yet. 2 months passed until I told the assigned technician I need a refund. She claimed she would pass it on to Mr. Nelson, who suddenly decided to stop replying to my emails. The lady at consumer affairs contacted him again to inform him about the refund, she replied to my email with the following:
Mr. Nelson has just responded to me by stating that “Claro wouldn’t be able to refund you because there is connectivity on the modem, just not at the speeds you would like.”
This is the last I have heard from them since I bought the modem 4 months ago with 1 month of unacceptable internet service. In total, I wasted around $11,700.00 JMD on this modem and the 1 month service.
I’d like to thank Petra Young, the lady who looked after my case from consumer affairs. I’d also like to thank Randolph Nelson, who was just doing his job (I think hiding away from my emails is a part of Claro’s internal rules).
Conslusion
Claro is a typical Company that does not care about customers. They are unethical and their customer care reps are well trained with bullshit. I can safely say, being a digicel customer, they’re customer care is on par with Claro’s. Their prices are also very high, but because there is not much competition, people run to them as I did (for a lower quality service).
Names may or may not be removed upon request.
