Lebara Mobile (FR)
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Customer Service Worse than Useless
Switched to Lebara from Sky and seemed to go ok - had temporary number for 3 days but after my old number was supposed to be reinstated, calls were ok but texts were still appearing as coming from the temporary number for some contacts, but not for others! I rang Lebara and spoke to a guy (in India, I think - he had a heavy accent so I wasn't convinced he properly understood the problem) who said it was an RCS issue and talked me through how to switch RCS OFF on my phone, saying it wasn't necessary and just to use SMS instead! I noticed that the RCS on/off menu page showed the Lebara number as my temporary one, which I reckoned was the route cause of the problem. Annoyed that I was missing the advantages of RCS, I rang Lebara again and spoke to another guy (in India, I think - same language barrier issues) hoping to get a better result, but he just said RCS wasn't supported by Lebara - which is incorrect! Frustrated I started googling, which led me to a thread on Reddit (titled "Fix for RCS chat not setting up") suggesting an RCS issue and showing a sequence of steps to reset various aspects, including remove SIM, clear caches, reboot, reinstall message app etc. - it didn't seem to work at first and I no longer even had the option to switch RCS on/off but after leaving my phone for an hour or so (for things I don't understand to maybe happen at the network end of the process, I think) it all worked! The RCS option is now back (if I did want to switch it off/on) and importantly, it shows in that part of the menu my 'normal' number rather than the temporary one that was showing when I first rang Lebara to try and resolve. So, Lebara are absolute rubbish. They were talking cr*p. It's a cheap contract, recommended by Martin Lewis, but customer service knowledge about their own product and phone network technologies is absolute zero!