August 6, 2012
So, I went to the Sprint phone store the other day in an attempt to have my son’s phone restored from “Military stand-by” status in preparation for his return. I had been in the day before and was told to return with the necessary information. In February my son had placed the phone on the status when he left for Afghanistan. She then handed the phone to me so I could verify information. I provided the security PIN and other necessary information. The operator on the other end of the line said “no problem”. After a few minutes on hold he came back and explained the account had been closed, although I personally paid the last bill in February of this year. He added that a payment was needed to restore the phone to service. I made the payment and again was told “no problem”. He then said he would connect me with account services to re-activate the phone.
After an hour or so on hold my call was disconnected. The representative called me back and said he was sorry, but the account services people were busy and apparently lost the call. This all started at 9:00 am and it was now almost 11:00. Finally I spoke with account services. The person spoke very little English and began explaining that I needed to make a payment or the service would be cut off. I tried explaining that a payment had just been made, but she didn’t seem to care or want to listen. Abruptly she stopped talking for about a minute, laughed and said she thought she was still talking with a previous customer.
Never did get the phone connected. They finally said the billing address I gave was not in their service area, although it’s the same address my son used when he started his plan over a year and a half ago. Eventually I asked to speak with a supervisor, but was told that I could not speak with one because the supervisor couldn’t help me either. These people are inept.
I sincerely hope this is an isolated incident. Our military personnel deserve more. I thought it would be nice to provide my son with the ability to communicate with friends and relatives when he returned, but Sprint apparently doesn’t care that much about our military personnel.
I posted the above on Facebook. A friend forwarded it to the Sprint Facebook page. Within a few minutes she received three emails from Sprint. These were forwarded to me. I was instructed to email “Sprint cares” which I did. Have yet to hear from them.
This post was submitted by Frank Jermy.
