It's That Love/Hate Relationship Again

Aaaggghhhhh! If you Google any of the major cell phone companies, you can find unhappy people...and Sprint is no exception. I was searching for this logo to use in my blog post and found out that Sprint has actually canceled contracts because people have spent too much time calling customer service! Who, in their right mind, would call Sprint customer service if it was not absolutely necessary (as in 'a necessary evil')?

After these past two days, I may be on their list. In the last two days, I have spent 2 hours and 45 minutes on the phone with customer service. You see, I just added a fifth line to my account so that my parents could switch from Cingular/AT&T to Sprint. I've got extra Family Plan minutes and they have no more contract with AT&T. They will be paying just $20/month for their two phones and I'll save minutes by being able to call them mobile-to-mobile. Seemed like a good idea for both of us. So the plan was to port their Cingular numbers over to my Sprint account and close their account. Sounds simple enough, right?

Let me make the LONG (2 hour, 45 minute) story short. There is an old saying, "It's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know." With Sprint, it's not WHAT you say, it's WHO you talk to. I talked to 2 people for a combined time of 2 hours this week (that does not count 30 minutes of hold time just to start the process!). There was a 'password' problem porting the numbers over to my account. I explained what I was trying to do, explained that AT&T already knew what was going on and explained all we need was for Sprint to 'do their thing'. After repeatedly being transferred to one non-native-English-speaker after another (2 hours, 2 phone calls), I was finally transferred to a nice lady who asked, once again, "How may I help you." When I explained how much time I had spent with customer service over the past two days, she seemed to take a genuine interest in solving my problem...and solve it she did. I am not exaggerating when I say 2 MINUTES after I explained what I was trying to do and what the problem was, she had it fixed! Both lines have been switched (when I call, I get Sprint voice mail), and now all I am waiting for is for the phones to be activated.

So my love/hate relationship with Sprint continues. One minute they are giving me two free phones and 600 more minutes for less money that I was paying before, and the next call they are reading from a script with a hard-to-understand accent seemingly not interested in helping me solve a problem.

If I lived in the country where the majority of Sprint customer service representatives appear to be from, I guess I would be happy knowing it is time for my cell phone karma to change for the better once more!