Now, this story about Sprint is funny. Seems a woman who wasn’t paying her cell bill on time received a collections call from the carrier. She missed the call, but called back the number that showed up on her Caller ID, which she recognized because they had called her before about her unpaid bill. She dialed the number, and got this message:
Pay your Sprint bill or your service will be shut off. It’s that simple. If you don’t pay your Sprint bill, you might as well take your Sprint phone and throw it in the trash. Even a person with your limited intelligence should be able to figure that out. Go ahead - write a check. Hang up the phone, write a check, jerk.
So she called Sprint’s customer service center to complain about Sprint’s collections department, and got the run-around:
"I played it for about 2 or 3 people, and they said they couldn’t hear it, and they were more concerned about me paying my Sprint bill," Tosa says.
So she called a local TV station to complain, and when the TV station called Sprint, they got the real story. The Sprint customer had mis-dialed by one digit, and reached a small business owner with a toll-free cell number, one who has received and logged more than 8,000 calls meant for Sprint over the past 2 1/2 years. At a cost of more than $1,000. He originally called Sprint to try to work out the problem, but they just told him to change his number (which he didn’t want to do because it was printed on tens of thousands of the maps he sells). So he got upset.
"I’m in the map biz," Woodworth says, "and my phone number is printed on my map, and there are several tens of thousands of them out in the field with my phone number."
Woodworth says since Sprint wouldn’t help him, he got fed up and decided to record the insulting out-going message on his voicemail.
He explains, "My objective was to get them to call Sprint, and light a fire under them to get Sprint to do something."
It looks like the fire has been lit. Sprint officials tell us they’re in the process of changing their collection department phone number.
Of course, the irony here is that none of this would have happened had not Sprint’s customer and public-relations skills been nearly as bad as they appeared to Ms. Tosa to be. They could have changed their collections phone number two and a half years ago when the problem arose, or they could have treated their customer with some respect when she called to complain, without forcing her to go to the media to get some relief.
Via Engadget
