Three months ago I was driving my children to a theatre performance in St. Augustine at the Florida School for the Deaf. New to the area, I got lost due to poor directions and suddenly out of no where a fire truck was directly behind me, sirens screeching. Paralyzed I moved neither left nor right but just prayed that they would not plow into my backseat where my 11 and 8 year old children were sitting. After the truck went around me, I pulled into the nearest strip mall; there were no stores, just a few medical offices in this rural part of St. Augustine Florida. I phoned my husband, my heart still racing, and begged him to let me buy a GPS so that this did not endanger our lives again. My husband is a second year medical resident at one of the local hospitals in Jacksonville. Because he receives only a stipend, and we have decided to home school our children, our budget is tight our lives and the lives of our children take precedence. Although we never made it to the theatre performance that morning, my husband agreed to purchasing a GPS for me, and that is when my problems with customer service at Sprint began.
As my cell phone was less than 30 days old, I contacted Sprint to see if I could change it out for a model that offered GPS. Although I was at the 30 day mark, customer service told me that evening that as long as I went into the store, chose my phone and called them back by midnight of the following day, I could swap my phone out and only pay the difference. The folks at the store were friendly but less than attentive as they made no money on the upgrade. It had to be handled through customer service at Sprint and the new phone would be sent through the mail. In between walk in business and computer work, the store representative directed me toward a few phone models. I chose the Pearl, not knowing that the better models appearing under the Nextel display would work as well.
When I dialed customer service from the store to finalize the upgrade customer service did not remember authorizing the upgrade nor was there any note in my account and they denied me the right to upgrade at all. I was not pleased and walked out of the store and over to another cell phone kiosk to explore my options. The sales representative convince them to allow the upgrade but then the customer service rep at Sprint on the phone failed to clearly explain that I would have to purchase service on this phone to actually have GPS, the sales rep at the store also failed to mention this or inform me that I could purchase GPS online through a number of companies. Although I did receive my new phone a few days later I still had no service for the GPS. When I went back to the store to ask them why it did not work, they informed me that the service was extra. They went ahead and sold me a $45.00 service plan for the GPS, failing to tell me that I could purchase just the GPS from Navtel or Garmen for $9.99/mo or $99 for the year. They did extend a $15 good faith credit to me, leaving me with $30.00 per month in billing.
I was also having trouble with the phone, actually using the keyboard, it was split and it made dialing difficult, for another $100 they told me at the store that I could have bought the Blackberry Worldphone even though it was displayed as a Nextel phone, I wondered why they did not tell me that when I first went to get the phone. Again I struggled with customer service and had to beg them to allow me to pay them an additional $100 for the upgrade to a better phone.
Then, having the right phone and a GPS plan, I decided to change my plan to unlimited minutes, having dropped my home phone line, we were using minutes up very rapidly. This was offered to me by Sprint Retention, who I had talked to when I was begging to purchase a phone that would work better for me, so they offered me a wonderful price of $95 for this unlimited service. But, when my bill arrived online it was for $869 dollars, instead of the $170 plus tax it should have been. I also had purchased an internet air card from Sprint; they forgot to mention the high cost of service on this card and the contract until after I had waited 30 minutes for them to drive over to another store so they could sell me a used air card (already opened), when I went back the next day they had plenty of new cards in stock, they just wanted to sell me the used card.
Instead of informing me of costs upfront Sprint seems to always be doing something to deceive and appear to charge less than they really do. I just want the honest story the first time.
After I spent about 10 hours of time with customer service to no avail, my husband finally had to call Sprint and get the $869 bill reduced. They had received the tracking that the old phone was on its way back to them but they billed me for it anyway, along with other charges that I was not supposed to be billed for. They finally reduced the bill to $224 which I paid in good faith expecting to be credited the next month for about $30 in excess charges that were not ours. In fact they even told my husband they had a fourth phone number on our account when we had never had more than three lines.
However, our next month's bill was $569 and included roaming charges. They don't tell you in the Sprint Manual forthe Blackberry World phone, 8830 that it automatically roams off the Sprint network when there is a stronger signal from another network even though you are in the Sprint area. In order to turn this feature off I had to rely on my computer training background of 18 years to figure out that the Manage Connections option had to be changed to IEXV, or something like that, to select an option that turned off Global and allowed you to specify Sprint only, I later shared that piece of information with one of the Sprint reps at the store who had never heard of doing that before. In talking to T-Mobile and Verizon customers I find that they do not have this problem because these phone companies offer free roaming because they know their signals are strong, Sprint is weak in Jax but we stayed with them because they had been our carrier in Orlando where we lived before and our family is with Sprint as well because of our recommendation years before. Sprint roams often because the network signal is weak and the World phone prefers a stronger signal. Before we could address these roaming charges my service went off for 24 hours just on my phone. My husband and daughter who are on the same billing statement did not lose service. I felt like I was being singled out, perhaps because of all the customer service problems.
My husband, after waiting an hour for customer service, getting hung up on, and calling back only to get our 10th customer service representative who did not speak English well; most of their customer service calls are transferred to the Philipines or the middle East, we think, most definitely to off shore locations, we did finally get information on how to restore service. The battery had to be removed and the connections had to be reset by Sprint.
In the mean time we spoke to the medical sales Representative who handles the hospital sales for Sprint in the Jacksonville area. He passed us on to someone in Elmsford NY who called about 2 days after service to my phone was restored. My husband had already talked to someone that day and had the roaming charges removed and changed our plan to include free roaming (more money for Sprint because of problems they had caused by weak signals). The gentleman from Elmsford reduced our bill further to compensate for our woes (we did not ask) leaving it at $62 we think.
The reason we are not sure what our bill is now is because Sprint changed their website 3 weeks ago and we have not been allowed access to our account for the past three weeks. I have called customer service 3 times for help logging on, after trying to re-register myself about 7 times. I was unsuccessful and so were they. They apologized at customer service and said try back in a few days. I asked for a statement to be mailed to me because I receive no bill other than online but they have not done this and it has been a week since I asked.
I figured I would wait and try again in a few days, but 2 days ago my service went out again. I was 120 miles from home, caught in rain storms in Orlando with no service. I had to drive to a friend's house in Orlando and phone my husband asking him to step away from his hospital duties as a resident physician and take the time to call Sprint and find out why I lost service. Also my phone battery which holds a charge for 300 hours of talk time was drained after one 5 minute call. I have been only getting about 20 hours of talk time and 10 hours standby lately and the phone is not yet three months old. My husband was told to take the battery out again and that they would reset the connections at Sprint. They blamed it on the phone not the service.
Yesterday, I was completely out of patience. Our contract has 21 months or more to go and we are stuck with this loser company that cannot give us adequate phone service, and will not supply us with a bill but continues to over bill us month after month. I called Blackberry support to find out if I could use the phone with another vendor, but I cannot. The phone cost us $199 plus the price of the charger, and if we go to another vendor I would have to buy a new phone which is GPS compatible, a new car charger for the phone, a car charger for my husband's new phone, new blue tooth accessories possibly, and pay activation charges as well. This would could cost us as much as $500 depending the the activation charges at other vendors. My phone is not even available for $199 at the other vendors so I would have to down grade the phone and settle for a cheaper model. Blackberry support at Spring also told me that my phone is running two concurrent voice plans and two concurrent internet plans which is why the service keeps going out. The phone is being overworked trying to figure out which plan to use every time I voice dial or use GPS - the tech support person said I am basically confusing the phone. I believe this has greatly shortened the life of the battery, possibly even the life of the phone. We are also being charged twice for the Unlimited phone plan and for the internet program which is probably about $300 in billing per month plus my husband's and daughter's phone which add another $100. My husband works 300 hours a month training to be a physician and owes $300,000 in medical school loans. Our adjusted gross income this year is in the low $20,000's and I home school my two children and cannot even work part time in Jacksonville because they do not have home school drop off classes here and we have no family here and no one we can ask to help. All this will change in June of 2009, when we move back to Orlando where we have adequate part-time class room option so that I can work part time, but we just cannot afford these kinds of charges that Sprint is billing us.
I called the gentleman from Sprint in Elmsford yesterday. I left three phone messages and 1 email but I have heard nothing from him. My phone plan should be $95 for unlimited on my phone, $50.00 for my husband and daughter's phones, $59 for the internet air card, less the $30 credit for their poor salesmanship (and dishonest salesmanship), $30 for the gps service (which I would like to purchase directly from the GPS companies for $9.99 instead) less a 23% discount on the voice packages, bringing the bill to about $170 dollars plus tax. I have no clue what they are actually billing us and I have an unreliable phone because their service is destroying my phone battery and taxing the phone itself. No one will talk to me at Spring, at least not in anything but broken English, I cannot access my bill, and I am unable to resolve this matter without your help or seeking expensive legal advice.
if I refuse to pay or cancel our service they will hit our credit for the price of the phones (599 on mine and 299 on each of the other 2 phones because we will not have fulfilled our two year contract). Our plan is to purchase our first home toward the end of this year and we do not need a mark against our credit. Please help if you can. Companies should not be able to function this way in America and hurt honest hard working folks while sending American jobs overseas and filling the ranks of customer service with folks who work in other countries and do not speak English well. My mom is 70 years old and no longer calls customer service if a company makes a mistake, she says, "it will not help anyway." Please help us and all the other people that Sprint is probably hurting as well by airing this story.
--Harrassed and frustrated in Jax
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