Sprint Cellular: The Final Insult

Thu Jan 18 04:27:37 UTC 2007

Sprint certainly (luckily, not to me yet...) has a serious billing 
problem under certain mysterious conditions that nobody seems to ever be 
able to explain hence their ability to never fix..

I've been lucky but I have read of horror stories.. this not being the 
first. :(

nealr wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>   We used to have five phones with Sprint. Two months ago we dropped 
> them after six months of trying to get them to bill us for our plan. The 
> bills had been consistently 50% - 100% over what we expected. Each time 
> they were apologetic and a refund was issued. The final straw was an 
> hour long call with a very helpful Sprint person who told me their 
> internal systems were such a mess it was 'almost impossible' for them to 
> provision a customer correctly if the customer had added phones as we 
> had done. Her attempts to fix the problem only made the next month's 
> bill worse.
> 
>   I spoke with someone at Sprint, told them we weren't going to put up 
> with it any more, canceled our service, and told them they needed to 
> have someone contact us to sort out how much of the $1,400 bill we 
> actually owed. No one ever contacted me. A written complaint of a 
> similar nature sent to their headquarters has also gone unanswered.
> 
>    Today I received a collection notice - not only the additional $1,400 
> due but they apparently failed to cancel our service on the basis of 
> that call and let two more months of billing @ $300/month accumulate 
> before placing the debt for collections. Our expected monthly rate was 
> $175/mo and this 40% overcharge was fairly consistent with our 
> experience with Sprint when we were a paid up customer.
> 
> 
>    I can at this time wholeheartedly recommend against ever using 
> Sprint's cellular service. We liked the service itself and bent over 
> backwards trying to get the billing problems resolved, but they seem to 
> be relentlessly incapable of managing their own internal systems in such 
> a fashion as to provide good customer service.  I have not yet read 
> their 10Q/10K filings but when I see stuff like this on my own account 
> and many other Sprint customers confirm that they've had similar 
> experiences I have to wonder how well the company is doing financially.
> 
> 
> 
>    I see this collection notice and I imagine I am going to go ahead and 
> pay the bill eventually, but this matter is going to be bitter pain for 
> Sprint before I'm done.  Sprint investor relations is the only visible 
> receiver of this email but I know that a great many of you are like me - 
> owners of businesses that might purchase cellular service, or technical 
> staff in a position to influence such purchases. Perhaps a few of you 
> are even more like me in that your given to writing the occasional 
> freelance article in the telecommunications arena.
> 
> 
>   I figure this email alone is worth maybe $200,000 in negative 
> advertising for Sprint. That is a nice start, but I feel the urge to 
> keep going. I'm going to pay the $2,000 I owe Sprint, but the only 
> source of funds for this bill will be articles I write about this matter 
> and sell to the various trade journals.  My own story is frightful, but 
> it'll be an easier sell if I've interviewed a few other victims. If 
> you're smarting from Sprint's incompetent handling of billing please 
> feel free to drop me a line and tell me all about it.
> 
> 
> 
>                                                                Neal 
> Rauhauser
> 
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