I caution everyone to tread warily with Sprint's cell phone service, especially in relation to your phone bill. Sprint offers a feature on their website that supposedly gives customers "estimates" of how many minutes you have remaining in their plans; these "estimates" are supposedly updated every 15 minutes, but more often, they are not updated for days or weeks at a time.
The result is that if you use a Sprint cell phone with any regularity, you might log on one day and find that you've supposedly used far more minutes than you thought previously—even if you checked the website, say, the night before and barely touched your phone since then. This happened to me just this month (July), along with other Sprint customers I know. After several frustrating emails, I was promised 20 free "courtesy minutes" for July to make up for any inconvenience... However, those minutes have not shown up, and other Sprint reps have no record of them either.
Obviously, Sprint's customer service is a nightmare. Once, for example, I altered my plan online, and received a confirmation screen (of which I wisely printed off a copy). However, my plan went unchanged for two months. Since the alteration saved me money, I was understandably anxious to see it take place. Repeated email complaints carefully detailing the failure to change my plan resulted only in form-letter responses welcoming me to change my plan whenever I wished, just by following "the enclosed simple steps". They didn't seem to understand that I'd ALREADY changed my plan (hence the before-mentioned confirmation sheet), and only wanted the change to actually take place.
To make a long story short, that particular problem took six emails to resolve. One reply from Sprint actually began by apologizing for any miscommunications, and promising that at Sprint, they "bridge the communications gap"... Just before I was again given a completely useless form response!
Also, if you log on to the website to email them a complaint, beware... If the site has high traffic, clicking "submit" might very well log you out of the site altogether, and erase your message without sending it! Always copy your message before submitting it, in case it's lost. Otherwise, Sprint's phone service is good—just don't expect anything from their customer service, and NEVER trust what you see on their website, no matter how accurate they insist it is.
Not to be preachy, but one final piece of advice: report any problems to the Better Business Bureau. Reports can be filed online at www.bbb.org, are quick and easy, and the BBB takes them very seriously. Also, they're often enough to scare customer service reps into actually doing their jobs for once. I'd recommend you try a different company, but as one who has worked in phone services in the past, trust me—they're all bad.
Thanks for reading my rant, and good luck!
Michael
62901, Illinois
U.S.A.
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