Jess and I don't have a texting plan for our phones. Therefore, we are particularly annoyed with spam text messages because they cost us $.20 each in order to be annoyed. We don't get them very often, but Jess just got one and I decided I wanted to stop them. To be clear, these aren't just wrong-number texts, these are unsolicited-advertisement texts ("News alerts for your area! Text 'Yes' now to sign up!"). We're OK with humans texting us occasionally but I don't want to be paying to get ads sent to me.
So, I called T-Mobile's customer service. I had to work my way through a voice-prompt menu but it was fairly short and at the end I was actually connected to a person and not put on hold. I told the CSR my problem and he offered two options: turn off texting completely or block 3rd-party texts. 3rd-party texts are advertising services, bulk-messaging services, etc., basically the kind of things you never want to get texts from anyway. So I said that a 3rd-party block sounded great. He said sure, activated a 3rd-party block for both of us and asked if there was anything else he could do. I asked another unrelated question about my account and when I hung up I checked the call time: 5:18. Subtracting out the time spent on the unrelated issue it took less than 5 minutes of my time to get the issue resolved.
Bravo T-Mobile.
No charge, he never tried to sell me something ("While the computer's pulling up your account information let me tell you about our new...." -- that annoys me), and he was polite and competent.
Compare this customer service experience with the previous one from AT&T. That difference is why I will be very sad if the T-Mobile buyout by AT&T goes through.