Sprint PCS® Customer Service Follies

I was trying to get my wife Karen's defective cell phone replaced. The repair place had never seen the model in question and the national phone number, which I had to call 4 times to get a human, said they couldn't just send a replacement because it's not being made any more.

I used the store locator on their web site and got the number of the local repair shop. I dialed it, and the option for customer service kicked me back to the main line. I called back and hit "0" right away.

The response? An automated "Good bye". And they hung me up! What's up with that?

I combed through the invoices one at a time ooking in vain for anything detailed about the phone in question to prove it's still under warranty. There is no search function—all the bills are in PDF. Never mind that the one helpful person I talked to on the national number told me the activation date put it under six months).

Later, after going back twice, we managed to browbeat them into doing the right thing and replacing the defective cell phone. The new cell phone had this crappy imitation of the Mac OS X Dock, which Ask Tog (Bruce Tognazzini, a former Apple employer) has already trashed for its poor usability, that my wife had to turn off before she could stand to use it.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Monday, June 28, 2004 (Link)

Comments

Posted by Z*lda Wednesday, July 7, 2004 at 11:06 AM

Yours is the THIRD weblog entry I've read today about the hassle of getting a defective cellphone replaced. Did it cost you $300, too?

Posted by Chad Lundgren Wednesday, July 7, 2004 at 12:09 PM

No, the replacement didn't cost us anything. However, I realized later that it's refurbished, so time will tell. It's similar to the one I'm using, so hopefully it will last longer.