It started with that ridiculous marketing campaign they called “In My New World.”

I thought it would be about them introducing new services. It turned out about them rebranding. MTC Touch decided to drop the part of their name people use to call the company. They lost the MTC and kept the “Touch” and that made perfect sense to them. I guess we should have taken that as a sign.

MTC decided to offer its subscribers something cool for Ramadan. They get to choose one number which they would be able to call for free after Iftar, throughout the month of Ramadan.

The concept of anything unlimited when it comes to phones in Lebanon is so appealing that many MTC customers jumped on the offer the day Ramadan started.

And behold, a few days later some of them get the following SMS notifying them that they cannot be offered the service because maximum capacity has been reached.

Thank you Twitter user @JessyBechara for the picture

Technically, they aren’t lying. Some of my friends who tried the offer reported horrible service: either the network was busy all the time or they got disconnected more than once during the phone call they were attempting to make and ended up giving up on. So for all matters and purposes, maximum capacity was reached.

However, is that even an acceptable excuse to offer a service so heavily advertised to some users and not for others? Why didn’t they mention it’s a first-come first-served basis which it turned out to be? Even that wouldn’t be acceptable.

Either offer a service to all your users or don’t offer it at all. If you know for a fact that your infrastructure is beyond horrible,  which I believe MTC Touch knows, then simply don’t flaunt anything unlimited to your customers until you can own up to it and offer it to all customers. Mesh neis bsamne w neis bzeit. 

Didn’t MTC Touch even consider in its plans that people would jump on the offer? If not, then they seriously need new people in charge of all their departments. If they knew their network would be overloaded and they still went with the offer, then that shows exactly how little they care about their customers. Again, not surprising.

“In My New World,” dear MTC Touch Lebanon, when I’m offered a service, I get it. Maybe you should have used that approach in your campaign?