Been Cheated By...

Sprint

So I am dropping my little brother off at the airport.  He’s 14.  He flew as an unaccompanied minor out to Colorado.  He has a cell phone, and I told him to give me a call if he has any problems.  I call my girlfriend who is circling around the airport waiting for me to get out so we can go home.  Well, I thought I was calling my girlfriend, in fact I was calling Sprint. So, I got my little brother to let me call her with his phone, and we met out front.

It turns out, Sprint completely screwed up my account again. Yeah, again.  I have literally had to call in and talk to them at least once every two weeks, and sometimes more, since January to fix my account (it is the middle of March).

This time they have decided that my sprint to sprint minutes (free), and my sprint to home minutes (I pay $5 a month for all minutes to Delta that I want) are billable against my anytime minutes and so I have almost $400 in charges to my account that are illegally/wrongfully charged to me.  They have shut off my phone for the 3rd time in a week and a half.

With all the problems we have had we decided a while ago that just going into a Sprint store was a good idea, not a licensed retailer, an actual Sprint store.  We learned this after dealing with the phone people for hours and getting no where.  We found that the manager at the Sprint store nearby us was incredibly adept, and able to handle the useless people on the phone very well.  She managed to solve some of our problems in 5 minutes when it would take 3 hours to be redirect 8 times and get no where on the phone.

So we call the store.  Our favorite manager isn’t there, but one of her top people is.  So we go straight from the airport to the store.  On the way there, she calls us back to tell us what she has found out and what our possible choices are.  We are three minutes to the store, so we get off the phone and do this in person.  The two deals that the monsters on the phone offered were 1) Pay $100 of the current money on our account to get the bill below our spending limit, or 2) Pay to add a bunch of extra minutes onto the account.

I refuse these offers because it is not my fault in any way that the minutes being charged to my account should not have. I also understand that paying any money would be like admitting that it is my fault.

So we spend 2 hours dealing with people on the phone and the crappy computer system that only has some information for some people.

A little background on this story:

Between January and today they have: put the wrong navigation plan on my account, supposedly taking it off my account and replacing it with the right one, then charging us for both.  Then when i have it completely removed, they still charge me for it. When I added my girlfriend to my account on a family plan, they removed the data plan from my number, even though it was still on the bill, and never applied our family text messages to her number.  Among other things, the call center people who are either named “George” or “Carl” not by birth but by pulling their “names” out of a hat are completely useless even when they speak English fluently. When we call in and have someone who can understand our problem, they give us the run around, or we are on the “other” system so they can’t help us.  (Sprint has two systems now that split their customers almost 60-40, one has a pin code the other doesn’t, AFIK this is the only difference)

Resolution:

The Sprint store with the store manager who I have come to know, and who knows my situation worked with us and confirmed that sometimes, some customers fall between the cracks.  So, when I came in and she told me that my account looked resolved, but then realized that all the call center people did was tack a bunch of free minutes on my account, she completely understood when I said I completely done with Sprint.  I talked to her for a bit longer, and decide to go to AT&T, while my girlfriend goes to Verizon.

We got our phones, switched our numbers and then went back to the Sprint store, where the manager helped us cancel our accounts without having to pay the fees.

We have not yet received our prorated month’s refund yet, but we are hoping that it comes soon.  On the good news side of things, my girlfriend sold her phone right away.