So let me tell you about the drama I've been going through the last week with Sprint.
Jer and I recently got iPhones so I had to cancel our family plan with Sprint. Now I realized all along that there was going to be a termination fee and I was willing to pay it with no problem. However, when we signed a new contract last year, we asked the sales guy how much it was going to be and he told us it didn't matter how many phones you had under the family plan, that there was one fee of $200 to cancel. We thought this was a good deal so we added his mother to our account for an extra $9 a month.
Now we always had trouble with dropped calls and weird things with voice mail not arriving till days later, but it wasn't really that big of a deal to call and complain only because we don't use the phones that much.
So we get the iPhones, and we were smart enough not to port our old numbers over to AT&T. I call Sprint and they tell me it's $200 per phone to cancel. Well I went off the deep end. I called back countless times always getting bounced to retentions. Most of the people I talked to blamed me for not reading the contract, but then I would turn it back around on them saying that they wouldn't even trust one of their own employees (i.e. the guy that sold us the phones)?
I started to get really pissed and started telling them scenarios that I would do to them so they would just drop me, for example:
In my current contract I have unlimited roaming and mobile to mobile. Sprint "has the right to terminate the contract if you use more then 800 minutes a month." so I told them that I would manually put two of the phones so they were on constant roam then use one to call the other and leave them plugged in and on for 24/7, racking up the roaming minutes which Sprint has to foot the bill for. When I told that to Kim (one of the supervisors in retentions), she got vary irritated saying how that cost Sprint a lot of money and that I can't do that. I told her that it says nowhere in the contract that I CAN'T do that and she didn't know what to say.
I also caught most of them not even knowing their own terms and conditions. At one point I had to actually read a paragraph from the contract and tell the lady where it was so she can review it (that was the night I was on the phone with them for 3 hours, all wile in roam).
I was in lawyer mode and had the contract all sprawled out and areas highlighted with notes and I kept track of each of the peoples names and what they verified as being correct. Justin tried to tell me that I would get charged for anything over 50% of the minutes while in roaming even tho my contract said it was unlimited. He told me that the contract tells me this but he couldn't tell me where it actually was in the contract and he refused to pull up the contract on his computer and read it to me. At that point I told him that the day before a lady named Andrea (also working in retentions) told me it was unlimited with no exceptions and then I told him he didn't even know himself what the contract said. So I was catching them in a lot of conflicting stories.
Finally, today the saga ended. I realized that every-time I was on the phone then walked to the basement I would break up. So I called retentions, walked to the basement, the call broke up and the lady in retentions kept saying she couldn't hear/understand me. So I walked back up stairs and told her this happens all the time and that's why I'm trying to cancel and no one would help me. She felt bad and made me a deal.
She canceled two of the lines with no fee, then put the third phone on an emergency plan (which 7 out of the total 9 people I talked to claimed that no such plan existed). The emergency plan gives that line only 75 minutes a month for $15 for the remainder of my contract, which is a year. This works out great because I was willing to pay one $200 fee to cancel the contract, but now I pay $180 and have a year to do it.
Suck it Sprint.
7 comments:
i hope u never have to resolve anything like this with AT&T as they are 1000 times worse than sprint could ever be. it breaks my heart not having an iPhone but... well i teared up just thinking about the last 4 months with AT&T (4 months of international travel).
the 2nd day after it was possible to switch service and keep you number i was a t-mobile customer and vowed to never go back to AT&T.
since, i have forced companies to exempt me from AT&T company wide policies and never, until the iPhone, thought a happy thought about AT&T.
not that t-mo is much better, but when u travel internationally and need a cell that rings around the world...
i am glad u got off clean in the end.
it is funny thou... my drama ended the same way. months of catching them in their own stupidity. proving their lies and ignorance and deceit to end up with 1 woman who not only knew what she was talking about but seemed quite human. i wonder if she was fired from AT&T when she finally let me out my contract and fixed 4 months of bills and is now about to get fired from sprint...
-steve
http://chaos.typepad.com
That was inspirational. Way to stick it to them!
Cell phone companies are crooks.
Yeah, my T-Mobile doesn't work in my neighborhood in Jacksonville. Which means I get no reception at home, being as most people don't have land lines anymore, this lead to a pretty significant problem of safety. When I called to get someone here to verify that the phone doesn't work in or out of the house, or even down the street any way in a 2 mile radius, they said that isn't part of their plan. The "Manager" offered me a month of compensation for my hardship, but nothing else. I asked about the compensation when I can't call 911 in an emergency situation. They also wouldn't take the compensation fee off of the total cancellation fee. I would have been happy and cancelled right then and there. They said they don't guarantee service in a residence or in a car. I was in a really bad mood for a long time. If I lessen my cotract minutes with them, I have to resign another 2 years. So it's a rock and a hard place because the service sucks but I can't afford the $180 to get out of it. It's a crock.
hey man i was just wondering if anybody tried roaming minutes and got out from sprint's claws with no ETF, I'll appreciate any help.
as soon as i cancel my sprint contract i will go and get myself an iPhone.
Dave
Ya, T-Mobile is so great that is why the charged me $400 after 8 years for cancelling my contract 34 days early. I NEVER called them to cancel my account, knowing that I had a month left on my contract with the intention of canceling my account after my contract was up, the problem is that they consider phone number portability as cancelation, and they are un-willing to work with me, at best I owe them the $79 for the remaining days on my contract. They are the ones that canceled me once I transferred my number to another carrier. After 8 years their coverage has not improved while all of the other carriers have surpasses them in service, coverage and technology.
Have you beat, they sent me a phone that was still activated for someone else, then wouldn't send me a return kit to return it, then once I did on my own buck they shut off my phone, then charged me a cancellation fee when they are the ones that accidently canceled my account, then when I called them they tell me my contract is up, switch providers the next day, just to find out that they lied, now I'm paying 2 phone bills, and after being told repeatedly changing the plans renews the contract, when I talked to them today they tell me it won't and switch it while crediting me the cancellation fee. All of this has been on going over the past 4 months. Oh.. and they sent me a phone complimentary for my troubles, then charged me for it, and it wasn't the phone that they said they would send me... and also couldn't get a return kit for that....
Post a Comment