Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
« Yahoo’s image bot Plone, Active Directory authentication, Mac OS X »
Sprint PCS problems
I’ve could tell a really long tale about Sprint PCS at this juncture. Most of it would be pretty boring. After working with 3 different reps over the last 6 months, they have still not been able to get our business account straightened out with the correct combination of billing and rate plans.
Finally, today I drove into to town to the local Sprint PCS store and spent an hour and a half with the manager at the store working through each of the 10 or so phones on our account and watching over his shoulder as he made all the changes in their system until I was satisfied that all the rate plans and extraneous charges were setup right.
This experience ranks up there on the Kafka scale with the manual punch card-based class registration system that was in place at NYU when I was there. It was amazing to me what he had to go through on their systems to make what seem like simple rate plan changes. He had to use two different software packages, because each — while designed for the same function — had some limitations which required him to go to the other to get it done. The changes on each phone required accessing some 15-20 screen + confirmation dialogs. And to apply the plans I wanted, he had to literally completely cancel out and deactivate several of the phones (like so they didn’t work at all for 10 minutes) and reactivate them because they were classified as “consumer” not “business” phones.
I really felt sorry for the guy, but he was very patient — and he will be getting commissions on my future phone needs as a result. What a cluster!
