So it’s October 14th, our wedding anniversary & my husband & I decide it would be a good day to upgrade our phones we have with Nextel that are several years old. We have been customers with Nextel for many, many years. He chooses a phone, I choose a phone & we arrange to have them delivered to the Nextel dealer shop locally so they can be programmed & ready to go as soon as possible, as my husband will be conducting business out of state the entire month of Nov. My husbands line is particularly valuable to us as it is also our primary number used for our business customers. We are assured that the phones would be delivered within 2 days & we would also have better service & coverage than our older phones had.
Much to our surprise our phones don’t arrive until 4 days later & at our home, necessitating a 25 mile drive (one way) to the Nextel dealership for programming.
Another unexpected surprise is that, despite her own calls to S/N our exceptionally helpful & patient representative at the store cannot have my new phone activated on our account because it’s registered with a different Nextel customer! Back it has to go, so sorry Nextel says they can’t do a thing about it, a different phone has to be ordered. I choose a totally different & advertised cheaper phone & have to wait another week, causing exceptional inconvenience with business calls.
A few weeks later & the phone issue (so we thought) has been resolved & my husband goes to Nevada for business. He is expected to be there a month & is looking forward to the “new & improved” phone service that we are told will be available in the area.
More disappointment when we find out that he has NO SERVICE except within a small spot on a road aprox. 30 feet long.
We then have to have all of his calls forwarded to my phone so as not to inconvenience our own customers. Nextel happily charges us for the call forwarding “service”.
Again I contact our local Nextel Rep. & she in turn contacts everyone she can to find a resolution to not having service available to us out of state.
One of the solutions is that we need to consider changing our phones to strictly Sprint network, thereby loosing our customer connections with those who contact us with the Nextel Direct Connect frequently, or perhaps we can try a “hybrid” phone that will work on BOTH the sprint & Nextel networks & towers (funny, same company but still running as 2 separate entities, that’s convenient) HOWEVER to try the hybrid phone we have to change our service plan. It should be comparable I’m told, but once we change we can’t go back to our old plan cuz it’s, well, old.
Meantime back in Nevada my husband is STILL WITHOUT phone service (except the before mentioned 30 feet of road), the hybrid phone is not a viable option either. So we are told having the service plan changes only being in effect a week it SHOULDN’T be a problem to get our old service plan back in effect as we only upgraded for a phone we cannot use.
Bringing us up to date on our Sprint/Nextel bill, November 17, I pay for ONLY the charges for the phone service, waiting for the equipment charges to be properly credited to our account for the returned & exchanged phone etc. Nevermind the fact that it will be nearly an entire month my husband has had virtually no phone service.
That brings us to today, Dec. 3, where when I attempt to make a call on my phone I am redirected to a Sprint/Nextel payment resolution line…no calls will go through & are all redirected for “payment resolution” This is yet again NOT A GOOD THING FOR A BUSINESS PHONE LINE!
Our account balance for some reason now sits at $951.42. This is an increase of over $600 than is should be, even including the new equipment purchases. I finally get in contact with a phone representative, go over the charges one at a time explaining each situation as it occurred. 45 minutes later he unraveled the facts that:
We are on the wrong service plan & are being charged $208.18, when in fact it should be $89.99.
There has been NO CREDIT recorded for the phone (I880) I had to return due to A FACTORY ERROR. This bumps us up another $227.90
The replacement phone I chose due to a promotional price of $79.99, we were charged $248.33.
Just because I’m annoyed, the fact that we have been charged $6.43 for a LATE PAYMENT, $12.00 for OVERNIGHT SHIPPING (DIDN’T HAPPEN) & $9.40 for call forwarding we were forced to use as a result of no phone service, stand out as more indifference to the issues & charges we have been dealing with for over a month with as yet NO RESOLUTIONS.
Oh & what is the $18 “handset upgrade” charge. Well it’s just something S/N charges when you get a new phone -WHAT?!?!?!?!
Not to mention they charged us $48…I remember something about 18 18=36.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel, after 45 minutes my phone rep. Tells me, not unexpectedly, that he needs to consult a higher up manager for authorization to fix our account. While I’m on hold my call gets TRANFERRED. I DO NOT want to start this process all over again but I’m told my call was transferred to an incoming calls only center & they have NO WAY to return me to the previous service representative!!! Would I please hold because they need to again transfer me, this time to someone who works with Nextel accounts.
Another person & starting from scratch all she can do is make notes (yet she sees the previous notes made by the “mystery” original service rep. They couldn’t transfer me back to). I’ve been on the phone over an hour now & she is trying to be helpful but can only send my “dispute on the charges” to a “resolution” person.
In the meantime I ask can we at least get this resolved so that our phone service won’t forward us to the “payment resolution” line should we need to, oh say, conduct business of our own???
YES. This at least can be done. Glory be, we have phone service tonight (we’ll take THAT day by day. I have no faith in the S/N powers that be for some reason) but our charges? Why thank you for your payment last month for the service, but our account continues to sit at $951.42 until it is “reviewed.”
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