Pushing Company Loyalty to the Breaking Point

If you are like me, you have a great sense of loyalty to the company you work for and the companies you have worked for in the past. I have always enjoyed my jobs and still feel a great sense of loyalty to each and every company where I have worked. Well that is until today.

I am a former Sprint employee. Well, that might be a stretch as I was really hired by Nextel and worked for them until the merger in 2006. I was only part of the new Sprint Together with Nextel for about four months before I moved on. I had a Nextel phone the entire time I was working for Sprint and when I left I wanted to keep my phone number as well as continue to support the company that had employed me for two years. I did however, decide to move to the new faster Sprint network and turn in my Nextel phone. This might have been my first mistake.

It started with the first bill I received after leaving the company. There was an additional $50.00 data charge on my phone. Now I use a BlackBerry device and pay for unlimited data use on my BlackBerry, so I was a bit surprised to find an additional $50.00 charge for data on my bill. I called customer service and followed their prompts. A customer service agent finally picked up after about 15 minutes on hold. She could not find my account. She finally noticed in my record that I had a Sprint device. Guess what, she was a Nextel customer service rep. She had to re route my call to Sprint customer service. You see the automated routing of my number always, even to this day, routes me to Nextel customer service despite the fact that I use a Sprint phone. This is something I have tried to have fixed since January of 2007. Here is the problem, I go to one queue, 15-20 minute wait, get transferred to another queue, another 15-20 minutes, only to find out that my record is in the new billing system now and I have to be transferred to a third queue. I didn’t mind this the first time it happened. The fifth time it happened I was getting a little upset.

Once I finally got to speak to a customer service rep that could access my account, they would be happy to credit me back the $50.00 on my bill. They didn’t understand why I was charged the $50.00, so they had no idea how to stop it from happening the next month. I would have to repeat this process every month when the bill came in. I would spend a good 2 hours on a silly billing issue each month. And if you think this is bad, this is just the beginning of my problems.

Needless to say, as a former employee, I know people who work at Sprint. I reached out to everyone I could. I even had my issue escalated to the “Employees Helping Customers” group. I got a few calls from a nice young lady who told me she would stay with this issue until it was resolved. She called me the next month to follow up, but couldn’t remember what my actual issue was, a sure sign she hadn’t done much to fix it. She hadn’t and it continued.

After the first four months of this process, I got tired of the two hour monthly call. I decided to just deduct the excess data charge from my bill and pay what I really owe. So the next month I got hit with a late charge as well as an excess data charge. No one called to find out why I wasn’t paying my whole bill, even after I repeated the same process the next month. In July of this year I finally called and after spending two hours on the phone, again, I was able to get some to credit my account. The lady that helped me that month told me she was normally sent people who wanted to close their Sprint account. I wasn’t at that point yet, but I was close. She was able to credit my account, but again could not tell me why I was being charged the excess data charge. She did, however, open a ticket with the network group to investigate the problem.

I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks and then on Thursday evening, I got a voicemail on my cell from a Sprint network technician. He called me again later that night and told me that he figured out my issue and that in order to fix it they would need to re-provision my device in the network. He said that my voice service should return in 20 minutes, but that my data service could take a few hours. I agreed to this as it actually sounded as though someone had finally troubleshot the issue and had a fix. He said he would call me the next day to ensure that everything had worked out fine.

Nothing seemed to have happened to my device that evening. However, when I got up on Friday, I noticed that the device was no longer working. I immediately called customer service to see if someone could turn back on my phone. An hour later, I finally got to speak to someone that was able to find my account in the system. Which now showed as cancelled. She could not change the status of the account or reactivate my old number. She was also now getting an error when she tried to look for the serial number (ESN) of my device in the system. She called a different department, while I was waiting on the phone, and had them try to change the status of my account from cancelled. They couldn’t do it with my old phone number or ESN. So she had them add a new phone number to that account with a bogus ESN, which in turn allowed them to change the status. Now my account wasn’t cancelled, however, she still could not get back my old number or do anything with my ESN. She tried to contact activations, but had to settle for opening a paper ticket to try and get both issues resolved. She told me that it could take 12 hours for the paper ticket to be completed. I hung up and I waited.

Saturday. I called customer service again. Again, about 45 minutes to speak to someone who could find my account. She worked with me for almost 90 minutes but could not help me. Finally, I was disconnected. I am not saying it was on purpose, but I have noticed that when customer service can’t seem to resolve your problem one of two things happens. Either you are transferred to the point where you give up or you are magically disconnected.

Sunday. I start calling in the morning. No one can help me and after a few hours of trying, I decided to stop trying to get my old number. I asked them to just give me a new number on a new account. I would go through the trouble of informing everyone I know that my cell number has changed. I went through the entire process of starting a new account. Of course I had my own, brand new, BlackBerry 8830 device, which I told her about. All I needed was the number added to it. The lady took my information, set up my account and then informed me that I needed to make a $150.00 deposit on my account. I had my old account for years and never needed a deposit and although I mentioned this to her, she told me that I needed to make the deposit to activate this account. I was tired of fighting, so I gave her the deposit. She informed me what I could expect my next bill to be and it sounded about right. I hung up and my phone started working. Well at least I could make phone calls. The data on the BlackBerry did not work right away. I knew that the provisioning can sometimes take a while, so I gave it some time. After a few hours, the data was still not working. I called customer service and after hearing the prompt that my wait time would be in excess of 20 minutes, I decided to give it more time to fix itself.

Monday. I called customer service in the morning and after the 20 minute wait in the queue, at least I now only had to wait in one queue as my new number is routed properly, I spoke to a customer service rep. She informed me that there was no BlackBerry data plan on my device. This was a little stunning as I assumed telling the customer service rep the day before that I had a BlackBerry would automatically get me a BlackBerry data plan. I will say this may be my fault as I did not specifically ask for the plan, but I expected that every customer service rep knows that a data plan is required on all BlackBerry devices. The plan was added and my device began working properly.

Wednesday. My phone had been working for the last day and a half. Around noon I picked it up to make a call and got a recording that my phone had been shut off for non payment or because I had reached my spending limit. My phone was turned off after FOUR DAYS. The phone routed me to the finance group, and I informed them of the issue. They could not tell me why my phone was disconnected, but they were willing to take a payment from me. They said I would have to dispute the charges with customer service. They transferred me.

Another 20 minute queue. The customer service rep informed me that I was now $15.00 over my spending limit and that I needed to pay my bill. I informed her repeatedly, as she did not seem to understand, that my account was FOUR DAYS OLD. I have not received a bill. She tried very hard to explain to me why my account was shut off and that my current charges were $163.95. This is on top of the $150.00 I paid on Sunday. So in reality, my bill was $313.95 after FOUR DAYS.

I had noticed when I first spoke to her that the last four digits of my SSN were incorrect in the system. This is what they asked me for in order to validate my account. I realized that this was probably the cause of my current problems. I informed the rep of this and asked to have my SSN corrected and have my credit re-run. If they did this, I would no longer be on a spending limit. She then informed me I would need to go into a store to correct my SSN. I needed to show proof of the number in order to change it. This is where I began to lose it. I told her I hadn’t needed to show it in order to open the account as I did it on the phone. She reiterated my need to go into the store. I asked to speak to her supervisor. She put me on hold and upon her return she told me that her supervisor also said that I would need to go to a store in order to change my SSN. Her supervisor didn’t even get on the phone with me. This is when I asked to close my account, as former employee loyalty or not, I had had enough.

She informed me that a different group would need to cancel my account, so she transferred me. I had already been on the phone with her for more than 60 minutes. After a 20 minute wait in the next queue, I was connected to a nice woman who listened to my issues, changed my SSN in the system, ran my credit, credited my account for the activation fee I was charged to turn on a number that Sprint shut off and she did all this in less than 12 minutes. Apparently the only way to get any customer service is to try and cancel your account.

I can’t imagine that any other customer would have endured this experience. It is only because of my loyalty to Sprint as a former employee that I have lasted this long. I have a hard time imagining that I am just one of the unfortunate few who are experiencing this type of service with Sprint. Although I understand how difficult it is to merge two large companies together, I would think that keeping your existing customer base should be your number one priority. I don’t see how you can do that treating customers in this manner.