3 Store

We’re visiting from the U.S. and don’t know the prepaid system well. These guys were quick to sell me but not quick to help out and explain things and left me to fend for myself with customer support.
On day 1 I came and was told I could buy a sim for £1and then for £15 I could have unlimited internet for 30 days. I bought that for my wife and then came back the next day and bought same package for myself and discovered the person from yesterday shouldn’t have charged me that £1 for the sim. I thought that was cool of them to point that out and refund the money.
The problem though was the next night when my wife’s phone stopped working. We came to Three today and they told us we didn’t activate right. They told us to call customer service. No desire to help us out. After some fighting they made the call From my wife’s phone and kicked off the Convo and then walked away and left us to resolve it.
We discovered we «topped off» right by entering in our voucher code but we didn’t hang on long enough to convert our plan correctly. These were instructions not given. Luckily the Three technical rep on the phone resolved this for us (we hope) and made the change on my phone as well since I didn’t activate correctly either.
Do yourself a favor and find a better place for your phone needs. I’ve dealt with too many people who don’t know or don’t care here for this to be an isolated issue.

As my contract has less than 12 months to run (Yes i’m impatient) I decided to call in 3 to have a look at deals.
As I had a rough idea of my phone and price, I just came in to pick up a booklet, they have an up to date one from June with tariff prices and phone prices for iphones.
The woman who served me, didn’t seem very friendly, She didn’t seem to say anything or try and ask me what I was looking at, she just handed me the booklet.
This 3 store is on Market Street, opposite Boots and inside the Arndale and is quite a nice, good sized store and is probably one of the nicer shops from mobile phone providers in the arndale, I like this store compared to EE as they have all their staff in one place, in one larger store rather than having 4 smaller stores including one large one, with 3 of them being within about 5 shops from each other — which is confusing and a waste of time.
3 seems to be one of the cheaper mobile phone providers out of the big names, and they even offer free roaming and phone usage in the likes of Spain (and most major european countries) and even The USA (roaming is very high here!) which is very great to see as some companies charge £8 a MB in the USA.
As this is a nice store, for what seems like a promising network, it doesn’t deserve 1 star but as my server, failed to do her job to the maximum, providing assistance and friendliness, I feel 2 stars is the right rating for now.

I actually ended up in the Three store quite by chance. Having been in the Orange/​EE network for a few years, I was looking to upgrade to the new iPhone 6 at an EE store. However, having been to two different city centre EE stores they seemed understaffed with no prospect of being served any time soon. So, I drifted into the Three store where I was greeted as soon as I entered by the friendly assistant, and everything was made so incredibly easy. In about 20 minutes, as a completely new customer, I was all signed up with a shiny new contract and walking out of the store with my shiny new iPhone 6!

Went into three today to get a micro sim for my partners iPhone, I approached the member of staff who wasn’t busy.
She told me the store doesnt have any and to go and buy one from one of the pound stores or try Carphone Warehouse — who charge £15!
Im slightly miffed at this:
a) You can order them from the three website — for FREE!
b) Why wouldn’t you be able to get a micro sim for Three, from a Three store?
Not exactly a great way to treat a potentially new customer (well my partner that is)

A while ago I was a 3 Mobile customer and I am really very glad that I’m not any more.
I always found the signal coverage to be patchy in comparison to other networks. The customer service was especially bad.
The thing is, you need to be prepared for the fact that when your two-​year contract ends,
Three won’t actually stop the contract. They’ll just let it role on and on and on without notifying you. And if you want your contract to end when it’s actually meant to, you need to call 2 months in advance of that. Mega faff. But Three will endeavour not to tell you this if at all possible, which is vastly annoying.
When you stop by this Three store on St Ann’s Square, the deals will seem amazing, and some of the really are. Just be sure that you watch what happens with the contract terms, because sometimes they’re not so friendly.

Do you ever wish you could be a fly on the wall at a training session for staff at mobile phone stores? I do. Because I genuinely think they hammer them. I think they threaten them with death by firing squad or throwing them into a vat of hot tar if they don’t hit target every month. And I’ve never met a more desperate bunch than Three.
Not only have I had to contend with attempting to end my contract when it ENDED (yes, I didn’t want to renew this, but didn’t want and renew just weren’t allowed in the same sentence according to the poor call centre worker I spoke with), prior to this I simply entered the Three store outside the Arndale Centre to see what my options were. The assistant thought he’d already sold me my new phone. I was, once again, just looking at my options.
The staff are knowledgeable but they will tell you porkies. I mentioned my bad reception when it came to my Three phone, the staff member said it’s far better than it has been, you just need to upgrade. Uh… I’ve spoken to friends on the latest and greatest types of Three contracts and their phones still die in certain areas of town. And I will confirm that since I’ve been with Orange, I’ve never had that problem. It’s a handy little store, sure, but I find the service a little pushy and the handsets somewhat limited.
I’ll be sticking with Orange from now on. Thank goodness I bought my new contract online so that I didn’t have to deal with the dreaded phone salespeople. I sometimes still have nightmares that they chase me down the road with a giant inflatable mobile in tow. Seriously. It haunts my sleep.

I always dread having to visit mobile phone shops as i normally find the staff are interested in hard-​selling some inappropriate tariff and phone, and moving on as quickly as possible to the next customer. Not so here, infact i was really delighted with the level of customer care. Very friendly staff but not in any way pushy in my experience, and they all seemed very knowledgeable about both the phones and tariffs available. I probably spent 20 minutes in the shop and in that time i was gently guided to a really good choice of phone and tariff, by means of some carefully aslked questions. Staff take time to listen to your concerns too and dont gloss over any drawbacks to the phones they recommend. Id also say their aftercare service is pretty good — i had a phone fail on me in the first 8 weeks after purchasing it, and there was no problem getting a replacement straight away. A good choice of phone shop, and highly recommended.

I really found the guys in this shop helpful. They weren’t all pushy and pestering like their lives depended on me getting a contract with them. They asked if I needed help, I said I was just looking, and you Adam and Eve it, they left me alone! If I had any questions about any of the price plans or phones, I could ask, and they were very helpful with their responses. The 3 network do really great deals anyway, but I would really recommend that you check them out if you are looking for a new mobile, on either pay monthly or pay as you go.