A Sprint Customer Satisfied... At Least For Now.

I don’t know if this will work for everyone with a Sprint cellular account, but I have been able to make it work twice now in the past 6 months on my company’s business account.

I have 3 cell phone lines through my small business account with Sprint and I have had to upgrade 2 of the phones in the past 6 months- 1 because it got dropped off of a marina dock and got wet, and one because I simply needed to upgrade my own phone for something with newer features/better call quality.

Both times I had absolutely NO success using the Sprint website to upgrade my phone. Trust me, the website stinks. You can never log in as a business customer and I think they do not use a cross platform between their online account management tools and the phone services such as the online store. It’s horrible, do not even try. Secondly, the service number is no use either; they simply pass you off to another department when you need a new phone. And do not get me started on the actual business-dedicated support via phone, email, or local reps. In my experience, they are all pretty useless.

But the good news here is the actual phone sales/upgrade toll-free line (800-SPRINT1) is better at providing you new phones than any other method. On my latest upgrade (my own personal phone), they even went so far as to take my information and call me back when the phone I was looking for was not immediately available- the new Samsung ACE.

It gets better… In addition to the friendly and helpful demeanor of the reps on the sales toll-free line both times, they also converted the mail-in rebates on both upgrades into instant rebates and took the cost of the phones down to the promotional prices immediately- i.e., no hassles filling out a form, providing proof of purchase, and waiting 6-8 weeks for a rebate check! One more thing- on the Samsung ACE upgrade I just did this week, I asked for the instant rebate conversion of the mail-in rebate because I knew they did it for me before (hey, if you don’t ask, you’ll never know, right?). Anyway, ON TOP OF THAT, the rep even told me he would STILL give me the mail-in rebate in my new phone shipment and that the instant rebate would be listed in my next month’s bill as “customer retention” service.

So the final price of my new “ACE” looks like this: $449 retail- $150 promotional - $100 customer retention -$100 mail-in rebate = $99!

Wow. From a company that usually gets poor CRM ratings and from which I personally have had some below-average experiences with along the way, I have been impressed with at least the tool-free phone sales line.