10.20.05
“Customer Servicing”
This afternoon I drove over to the Sprint Store in nearby Lakewood, WA to pick up a new cellphone for my mother. She has one of the phones on my Sprint account, and the little folding Samsung she’s been using suddenly decided to quit for no apparent reason – while it was sitting in it’s desk charger, relaxing and sucking juice, no less.
On my way to the Sprint store, I passed one of the skateboard parks in the area, and was rather startled to see one of the local police officers, who regularly patrol the skateboard parks, riding a ‘board (rather well!) while in uniform. Appears he was showing one of the kids there how to do something.
I found his doing something like that pleasant change from the usual attitudes shown between police officers and skateboarders. Kudos to the unknown officer!
At the Sprint store I explained the problem and what I wanted to happen – replace the dead ‘phone with one that worked, using the $150 rebate I had coming and had already confirmed. I’d even picked out the ‘phone I wanted to get my mum – a metallic pink Sanyo SCP-200.
As usual, when dealing with ANY cellphone operation, the entire procedure was overly complex, and waaaay too time consuming. From “in the door and talking to a rep” to “out the door with a pretty pink ‘phone in a box” was nearly two and a half hours.
Most of that time was spent with the Sprint CS rep flailing away at her keyboard and mouse or talking with her senior tech, office manager, or someone at the national service center to figure out how to get their elaborate system to simply swap phones and grant the rebate.
When she was finally finished she told me to take the new ‘phone home and call Sprint Customer Service from another phone so the they could talk me through programming the new ‘phone properly for use…
I ‘suggested’ that providing me with an actual working telephone rather than a DIY project should be part of Sprint’s job – HER job. She then took another 15 minutes programming the new cellphone so that it knew it was a cellphone, and what number it was supposed to be.
Is it just me, or has “Customer Service” these days turned into “customer servicing” in the same way a bull services a cow?
Duker said,
January 9, 2006 at 6:30 am
Your Mistake. You used sprint. I am on sprint right now and everytime i have needed customer service, i found it lacking. I found out that caribou maine has no sprint service aavailable and if you tell them you are moving there, they will not charge you a early termination fee. 8)