Why My Phone Says "Death to Claire!"
Written: Sep 13 '02
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Pros: Once in awhile they get it right
Cons: It's only once in a great while
The Bottom Line: Maybe Claire's mom likes her, but every Sprint Customer I've talked to wants to dash her brains out on a bridge abutment!
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| scmrak's Full Review: General Reviews of Sprint Customer Service |
I feel trapped. Held hostage. Ignored. Taked advantage of.
And, most of all, unappreciated.
The trapper and hostage-taker is a simulacrum named Claire. She's my "virtual sustomer service representative" for a Sprint PCS account. If you go to the Sprint PCS website (www.sprintpcs.com) you'll eventually see an image of Claire down in the lower left-hand corner. She's a kind of generic, pale brown critter with dark brown hair and eyes with just a hint of an epicanthic fold. In other words, her visage has been designed to appeal to all ethnic groups while offending none.
Too bad her programming wasn't designed the same way.
You see, Claire is a symbol for how the folks at Sprint PCS treat their customers. She shows up everywhere and, unfortunately she and her crew are just as incompetent in one area as they are in the next. Well, at least they're consistent! But let's talk specifics.
On-line Help
Heaven help you if you try to get assistance from the Sprint PCS website. So much of the real estate is given over to gushing about their new PCS Vision that it's difficult to navigate at all. And to make matters worse, the site is slower than molasses on a January day in Novosibersk (it invariably takes upwards of forty-five seconds to load a page on a DSL connection). You can log into the site using your phone number and a password.
Once you're in they let you cruise through the site to pages with your current account info, invoice status, remaining minutes, and the like. The site's not quite as slow once you're logged in, though. Of course, you're here for technical help, so you click on the icon of that brown-haired b*tch and go to "Claire's Directory for Service Solutions."
Is it just me, or does Sprint think everyone's an idiot?
I mean, the "solutions" they give are to the most inane questions, most on the order of "How do I dial my phone?" Well, not quite that simple, but almost. Once you get past a litany of sales pitches for new plans, phones, or accessories, you'll find a choice marked "Technical Questions." Here are the three -- count 'em, three! -- technical questions they support today:
1) Why do all my calls go to voicemail?
2) Why do I experience dropped calls? (The answer is that their coverage is lousy)
3) Why do I have static when roaming?
That's it. No other technical questions are allowed. You used to be able to fill out a form with a query, but that's not even available any more. Go figure.
As an aside, when you could fill out a form, it took 24-36 hours to get an answer emailed to you, and the sender was always Anjolie S. or Debashish C. or Ravi K. (Sprint apparently farmed technical support out to a company in Bombay). OK, fine if they let me know the email's from Sprint, but the subject line merely says "Re: ID# 25699011234" or something like that. Since I get 100 spams a day that have semi-interesting titles, do you think I'm gonna open up that one? Gimme a break! And when I did finally open one, the answer was always useless!
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you can't get out of Claire's Lair without backing out -- no link to your Sprint homepage or whatever.
Telephone Help
Now here, I've had better luck: Once I actually got an answer, though I had to spend a couple of hours on the phone over three days to get it. Since they forgot to turn on a new phone, Sprint promised me a credit for the 60 hours that it was unavailable. Yeah, right, like I ever saw that credit!
Claire's there on the phone -- this butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth voice, all cheery and spunky. Ha! she still can't help with anything! The only time I talk to Claire is to get my ten or twelve monthly credits for dropped calls. Sometimes Claire has a pushbutton menu, sometimes whe responds to voice commands. If she doesn't know what you're talking about, she'll send you to technical support. My experience has been that you usualy end up with a busy signal at tech support, and then you have to start over. What a surprise!
Getting Help in Person
Maybe it's jsut here, but I've yet to walk into a Sprint store yet where there isn't a huge line -- sometimes a wait of up to thirty minutes! And although I've never spotted Claire (or that smiling schmuck in the black trenchcoat) at a Sprint store, I have seen a lot of red-shirted employees who don't seem to be doing anything.
I usually drag myself to a Sprint store to update the software on my phone, since that seems to be the only way possible (theoretically you can do it over the phone, but it's never worked for me). Now let me ask you -- do other companies update the software four times a year or so? Sprint does.
Where Sprint Customer Service Has Messed Up
* When I set up the phone the first time, they gave me a phone number that was long distance from both my house and my office.
* When I replaced a lost phone, it took them 2-1/2 days to turn on the new one. I never did see that credit!
* When my one-year contract expired, they automatically renewed it. No letter in the mail, no email, no message on the website, no nothin'. When the Ms's ATT account expired, that company was all over her with special offers!
* When I set up the account for EFT directly from a checking account, they stopped sending me invoices.
* When I asked questions about coverage in Canada before a trip to Calgary, they didn't answer the question until I was already home -- and then they just repeated the question to me!
Overall
Frankly I grow tired of Sprint. If it wouldn't cost me a new television, I'd fling a rock at that idiot in the trench coat every time I see him. But I reserve my especial contempt for Claire, the symbol of all that is wrong with Sprint: she's slow, incompetent, and stupid. So now you know why I've customized the greeting on my handset to read "Death to Claire!"
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 40
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