BuzzMachine

Jeff, I am in the program as well and I have blogged it today. The phone is a Samsung SPH-a900.

Mileage may vary, but as a member of the working press, writing for my own sites and dozens of print publications, I told Sprint no when then offered it (and got no response). It would highly unethical in my position to accept free service of this quantity that’s not designed purely for testing and review.

That’s not true of everyone especially where it’s easier to disclose the fact that you’re getting the equivalent of $800 worth of goods and services at no cost.

I was included as well…and funnily enough thought it was some kind of Nigerian scam at first. It’s amazing how skeptical we’ve become. Anyway, I’ve accepted as well as have already discussed this on next week’s episode of Across the Sound. So I guess it’s working…

how do i sign up for this sprint stuff?

I want them to give me the money they buy congressmen (and women..Hi Hillary-who’s your daddy?!) with and pay me to save the world from blind faith: in marketing, in groups, in ‘Ed U. Cay shunned’, in ‘safe’ food, in ‘programs’, in patent ‘protection’, in mathematics, and in ‘somebody will do SOMEthing’.

Sprint Sucks. They are now every bit as bad as ANY phone company.
Long holds, disconects and IGNORANT employees at every level.
Did ANYONE recieve notice of being sold to Trinsic? Hey, it only cost me 200,000 rewards points. I’m interested in joining, or starting, a class action suit.
Anyone with similar experience should call the FCC at 888-225-5322 and log a complaint.

sprint is a great company ! cellular service great !lol although customer service sucks. i have been a sprint customer for 4 yrs. ps where is my free phone!

The wonderful world of sprint customer service. Intersting they contact you. They’ve actually contacted my sprintrants.com site several times offering their “helping hand” to the people who leave rants on my site.

The customer service run-around is pretty rediculous and can end up costing you all of your minutes if you’re like me and stuck in the Hawaii time zone and need to call on peak hours.

Feel free to stop by and leave a rant at sprintrants.com

Well as a single parent with teenage sons it is very important for me to get the perfect plan. In working with sprint customer service, I thought I had what would be the “perfect” plan. Yet month after month my bill is wrong, due to their error… they are only allowed to credit the bill $200… yet their errors always exceed that. I ask month after month to let me out of their contract. I am a prisoner, and am in risk of losing my phone service because I honestly can not afford paying for their errors any longer! Hell I would be happy just to have someone call me back who knows how the heck to fix things! How do I get out of these contracts, which happen to be staggered for each phone I have! By the way thanks for the FCC number I am lodging a complaint!

Sprint is TERRIBLE
they have screwed me over many times… lied about fixing my phone sent me out without even opening the phone to fix it so i had to come back 3 times before they replaced it and then sent me home with an unactivated phone.. then when my sister got her phone stolen, gave my mother’s social security number and account password, AND address to the theif.. because the theif pretended to be a sprint employee on the phone when really he wasnt.. he harrassed people in the phone book and sprint reactivated it UNDER OUR ACCOUNT FOUR TIMES and still wont take the charges off my mother’s bill. They don’t care about people, and the are rude. I’ve never met such rude unhelpful customer service in my life.. I can’t wait until my contract is up

Sprint is lowest form of a cum bag company on this planet and you are just playing into thier hands. They offer you some small perk to stop dissing them and you accept. Sprint has the worst service the worst customer service. The stores are no better I have had the police called on me for nothing more tham asking a few questions. They said I was harrasing them and would have to leave.

EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS!!!!! I am a Sprint Retail employee and have been with “the new Sprint together with Nextel” since the merger, prior to that I was a Nextel employee. I hear every day the complaints that all of you have made here on this blog. I would like to take the time to express ideas and information that may either aggravate you or alleviate your distress.. mind you these are not ideas, policies, or practices that i necessarily want to follow, but have to and it might explain some of your frustrations and WHO to take them to. Biggest concern is customer service. The actual *2 from your phone people are outsourced. They do not work for Sprint, but a third party company whom is contracted by Sprint. They usually give customers the wrong information including “just go to the sprint store.” Believe me this is just as frustrating for me as it is for you. Customer service CAN be helpful but in only a few select ways. If you have a billing issue they are the best people to call and you can request a billing specialist. We at the store level are not trained in billing information (although we can read them and tell you where you incurred overage charges or were charged for data usage) but we have very strict policies about how much we can credit a customer and for what reasons. Customer service has a lot more flexibility with this. A couple of stipulations remain: we are not responsible for correcting something more than 3 months old if you are negligent on reading your bill. We cannot back date insurance without some sort of proof that you either a) had it on your account before or b)have been paying for it and it doesn’t show on your account in our systems. “I told the guy to add it,” doesn’t work. I’m sorry but if you don’t take the time to make sure your bill is correct and all the right plans are on there (and 99% of customers don’t) then we cannot help correct the sittuations. customer service CAN offer special rate plans that we cannot at the store level. This department is called Retention. That is what they specialize in- RETAINING customers. Brought your phone is 6 times to get fixed over the last 2 years? Call retention. Not happy with your plan and know you could save money elsewhere but like the service? Call retention. That’s what they’re there for. DO NOT COME INTO A STORE TO CANCEL SERVICE!!!! We are not allowed to cancel your account. We by corporate policy have to put you on the phone to customer service to cancel your service. So now that you know the few things to call customer service about let me inform you of a little secret. We at the store level get paid based on responses to customer service surveys that you may get called to answer. READ THAT AGAIN! WE GET PAID TO MAKE YOU HAPPY! If that wasn’t incentive enough, do you really think that we enjoy having people scream in our faces, talking down to us, going as far as to use profanity and vulgar speech and threaten our lives over a cell phone? No. We put up with a lot grief from our customers and i believe a lot of it stems from 2 factors- 1) lack of proper expectations and 2) lack of common sense. the first one we can fix at the store level because it is my job to make sure you understand the fine print. Yes using the discount resigns your two year contract and its not because we are punishing you its because we have to balance the revenue lost by giving you the discounted phone by something. So we say, “here, have this phone at this price and stay with us for two more years.” It’s more of a barter-ship. Old school, but practical from a financial aspect and we are after all a company. And yes there is a $36 activation or upgrade fee. Every company has it, don’t try to tell me they don’t. If you would like the fee waived call account services after your 31st day of owning the phone and see if they can remove it.. its not guaranteed and not even i know the stipulations of it becuase we CAN NOT waive it at store level UNLESS it is a promotion that we are currently offering in the store or there are notes from customer service. As far as the lack of common sense- if your phone fell in the sewer and you bring it in to me in a plastic bag, wrapped in newspaper and hand me rubber gloves and say, “can you retrieve my pictures customer service sent me in here” then, yes, I’m going to look you in the face and laugh and think that you’re joking. Sorry- that’s disgusting. I’m not trained in hazmat and if you aren’t willing to touch your phone with a 10 foot pole than neither am i. Also, don’t buy a phone with a ton of gadgets if you either a) won’t read the manual or b) can’t figure it out. I don’t mind showing customers some of the more difficult things on their phones (like finding the scheduler) but putting your call on speaker phone will always be one of two options.. either the “speaker” button or after the number is dialed you hit options and select speaker on. Or READ THE MANUAL! Hey I didn’t learn everything on my phone by ESP… I read the manual. If you don’t have one they are avaiable as a PDF on the Sprint website. If you bring your phone to a service and repair center and you don’t have insurance there will be a charge regardless if the phone is in warranty if you don’t have service and repair covereage. We partner with manufacturers to provide our services. We do not make the phones. Only the manufacturers will cover the manufacturers warranty. My advice: get the insurance $6 a month covers all your service and repair at no additional cost and in case your phone is ever lost, stolen, or water damaged you can contact the insurance company and pay a $50 deductible and have the phone mailed out and not extend your contract instead of either a) paying full retail price or b) signing a new 2 year contract and using your upgrade elligibility. We will provide a loaner phone provided one is available (we only have a select few) and provided that your phone is genuinely defective to where it is unusable and we have to order you one. We generally do not provide a loaner phone for lost, stolen, or water damage/damage beyond repair as this is viewed as abuse and a risk to loan you one of our phones. I went on a bit of a rant but I have to finish up with a few last things. Sprint and Nextel merged because they saw great things in the future. A merger takes time and it is frustrating when policies change on such a rapid basis and we ask that our customers see through the hardship to the silver lining that we will be great again. The hybrid phones have hit test markets and will be bringing the nextel walkie talkie with the ability to use sprint voice and data services (an awesome feat). Our network really does have the strongest coverage and fastest data speeds. We are working in certain test markets to do a joint venture with comcast and some other cable companies to provide you with more services, 1 bill, and more solutions for time management. The managers of the retail stores are working together to lodge valid customer complaints with the customer service department to help provide a better experience to our customers when we do have to hand you off to them. Lastly, we ask you to be patient with us through your frustrations and let us help you the best we can. We understand when enough is enough, but we do care and will do everything within our policies to help you, we just need you to understand that we all have specific limitiations to our powers and abilities within the company. That is all. Thank you.

I truely have to believe there is a training school for Sprint
representives on how to screw it’s customers!
When you call customer service and it say’s there is a 20 minute wait .
Well that’s the first indicater that your dealing with a company that has
a lot of wrong billing and unsatified people.
I could write a novel on the terrible tactics Sprint uses to increase profits.
This it’s not the first company that I’ve seen this type of do what ever you can to increase profits training. “Best Buy” Electronics and Aol have similar programs

Can someone give me an idea whether or not I should go for a smart phone or just use a more stylish phone and wait for some better technology? I am on the Sprint network, and was referred to http://www.sanyowireless.com, but I’m not seeing any options that look like smart phones. I don’t need an MP3 player or a camera, I’d rather have a phone that is lighter and easier to carry. Any recommendations would be welcome.

20, 2008 3:34 PM

Well Well Well, it’s nice to see others are having the same problems I’m having, ALMOST!! First off I was a NEXTEL customer for 6 years before SPRINT so called merged, I was well satisfied with my service, I was using a NEXTEL Air Card for internet access and was satisfied until about 6 months after the merger when SPRINT had NEXTEL lower the speed to get people to buy SPRINT air cards which I fell for. I bought a SPRINT air card which went out 32 days after I bought it after downloading Sprint’s updates (remember this for later) I got with the NEXTEL/SPRINT store where I bought the Sprint Air Card and they called customer service (I had already heard from friends who were SPRINT customers that told me not to use SPRINT because customer service is really bad, I also heard this on National TV, well kick my ass for not listening) The owner of the store was on the phone with Sprint customer service and could not get these people to send the replacement Air Card to her store due to the fact that I was living on a boat because my home and area was at the time under water due to Hurricane Katrina, SPRINT sent the replacement Aircard to my home address which was undeliverable and returned, The owner of the NEXTEL/SPRINT store called a week later and they already had the returned Aircard to try to get customer service to send the darn replacement to her store again, Nooooo SPRINT customer service sent it to my home address again!!! There was no home there, nobody could live there because everything was under water again from hurricane Rita!!! the Aircard was returned again!! the NEXTEL/SPRINT store owner again called customer service……ok you know the story 3 times customer service sent the Aircard to my home address after being told all 3 times that I was living on a boat near her store and my home was on National TV and was destroyed and no one was allowed to return due to the damage in the area. Finally after the 3rd Aircard was returned the sent the Aircard to her store which I was able to pickup. I had to pay all my bills online without seeing a bill due to the hurricane situation. When I finally was able to catch up with my mail (I give praise to the USPS for their determination thru the hurricane crisis) I opened my bill and SPRINT was charging for 2 aircard services!!! I HAD ONLY ONE AIRCARD!!!! now I could only get reimbursed for 2 month service after I had been paying for 5 months for 2 Aircards. I canceled the service. Next I get a bill for early termination of 2 Aircards!!! $400.00!!! I called customer service, I agreed I should be charged for early termination for one aircard but not 2, well this became another nightmare, I was talking to what seemed like people who could not understand what I was telling them due to they were probably still getting over the 40oz malt liquor they had the night before, my calls were being dropped. I finally called back the 4th time and got a young girl who I had to explain, hun, If you bought a car which in 32 days after you drove it off the lot the motor broke, the interior fell apart and the paint peeled off and they replaced the car, should you pay for 2 cars? WALLA!! She understood my story now. I only paid for 1 early termination and was reimbursed 2 months of the 5 months I paid. NOW kick my ass again, 1 year later I got another Aircard which after I downloaded SPRINTS updates my USB ports on my computer will not work, I called Customer Service and the nightmare has begun again, I canceled my service again and paid the early termination fee and canceled my NEXTEL phone which I’ve had for 8 years. I checked on SPRINTS stock it was $.74 a share, I purchased 53,265 shares because I know someone will take them over and my stock will be worth quite a bit more later. SPRINT service was very good but their customer service is like trying to deal with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. (you people who had the Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac loans know exactly what I’m talking about) I’m using Verizon Wireless services now and am happy, I had AT&T but they can’t compare with SPRINT and VERIZON on Mobile internet services.