Fair warning: this post is pure rant.
I have a Sprint PCS phone that I use as my primary, and only, home phone line. There are tons of reasons why I like this arrangement, which I won't go into here, but I've been a loyal, pay-on-time Sprint customer for several years now. Which is why it was maddeningly frustrating to go to make a call today and get a note that my account had been shut off because I was over my spending limit.
I went to Sprint's website to see if I could find out how I'd used so many minutes, which they tout as the place where you can do everything you want with your account, only to find that my recent billing/usage information (including the overages) weren't available in detail on their site yet.
"Fine, I'm sure this is a misunderstanding," I think, "I'll just go ahead and pay to get service turned back on, and work out the details later". But of course it's not that easy! I make a credit card payment through their automated system, only to find out that it can take some indeterminate amount of time (up to 12 hours, said one service rep.) for that payment to apply to my account.
And this time passes as my family drives out of town, forgetting a few things that I had tried to call them about right as they left, when I got the "welcome to Sprint PCS..." warning.
So, that's two cases where different, critical parts of the Sprint PCS billing and account management system are not in sync, and where it will take some unknown amount of time for the data to be shuffled from one place to another. In my humble opinion, if you're providing an important service, which to many people is considered "mission critical", and you spend millions of dollars advertising it as a reliable, user-friendly thing, and you're going to shut that service off automatically because of the state of a certain data set, you damn well better be updating that data set on a VERY regular basis, so that as soon as it changes again, you restore the service. I can just picture it now: there's some tab-delimited export file sitting on the payments server, waiting for a cron job to fire up 11 hours from now that will transfer it to the accounts server, bringing my account back into good standing (even though, from my perspective, it already is). How much grief would they save by fixing that lapse? The Sprint service reps. I just shared these thoughts with on the phone would probably at least have appreciated it.
One Sprint. Many Solutions. Many Servers. Much waiting. Much frustration. Still not focused on the customer.
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Absolutely correct, I also like the fact that they make it so hard to make a payment, even their "automated" payjment system only accepts payments of $250.00 as a maximum - we recently switched to another carrier as a result of Sprint's constant problems.
I can't imagine what the chance of success is - your complaint getting to the right person. With these mega companies your complaint has to go through so many different departments - all competing for power within the company - before it gets to the person who could make the two line code change while she eats her lunch.
OMG! Sprint has the WORST customer service I've ever experienced! Just today, I was on hold for more than half an hour. Yesterday, it was 40 mins!Finally, my call was escalated to a "Customer Service Supervisor." (Not sure why they give them that title, bc all he did was tell me that he couldn't help me). And when I asked to speak to his superior, he said she worked in Administration and wasn't able to accept phone calls. Riiiight... all this to fix an error on their part. Think I'll write a very stern letter to Gary Foresee and his cronies. This mess has got to stop!
Sprint what a joke i have been on the phone for three days and almost 28 hours with all these idiots. We had fradulent activity on our checking account turned it in to the bank and my bank sent me a letter stating what had happened about the fraud a standard bank letter and i sent it to all of my merchants and sprint is the only merchant that would not accept the letter. Stating that it was not signed by a specific person ok so i call sprint because they have my phones suspende for a returned check even after i sent them the letter by the way i faxed it to them 11 times in three days and my bank faxed it 4 times. after sprint and i made a conference call to my bank then the rep from sprint then said that wasnt the problem anymore now she claims my account is 45 days past due when the day b4 it was only 31 days past due so i told her i would make a payment at that time by credit card and she told me that i had to go and make a cash payment using a money gram, even after all i did to straighten out a problem that was not my fault they just try to make it so difficult to deal with them. We are no longer with sprint after 11 years of service with them we went to HELIO and it rocks . SPRINT is bad and they will continue to get worse.