variablizer

ranting! injustice! nerdery!

It's The Little Things

Prior to having some work done in our backyard, I signed up for Angie's List to find contractors. We don't need a ton of work done, so I just signed up for the month-to-month account, and figured I'd cancel after I'd found someone to do the work.

So one day I login, and click the "Manage My Membership" button, where Angie's List cheerily informs me that my membership will expire 6/15/09. "Great," I think, "I don't even have to do anything, it'll just expire. How smart."

Not so.

As I was reviewing my credit card statement from this month, I see a charge from Angie's List on 6/15/09. Apparently they just renew your membership automatically for you, even though nowhere on your account screen does it say anything about charging you on this date. It only says your account will expire. Interesting.

I finally found their cancellation policy buried in their FAQ section, informing me that you have to cancel your account by phone, in writing, or by email, and it has to be done at least 5 days prior to your account period being renewed. No refunds.

So enjoy that 9 bucks, Angie's List. Instead of being up front and crystal clear about what you're going to do with my credit card information, letting me manage my personal information on your site on my terms and having a customer go away happy and satisfied, you've now earned yourself someone who will never give you another dollar. Was it worth 9 bucks? What do you suppose it'd cost to put a CANCEL button on the account screen? How about changing the wording from "Your Account Expires" to "Your credit card will be charged on XX/XX/XXXX?"

I'm guessing very little.

This is how you lose a customer.

I've been a Sprint customer for 8+ years, if I had to guess. I've had my current phone for nearly 5 or so. A Palm Treo 650. It's a friggin' warhorse. I also understand that in those years, the mobile landscape has changed. Dramatically. Because I'm either parked in front of a computer or several feet away from one, I've never really felt the draw or need of an iPhone. The new Pre announcement from Palm was interesting, at times exciting, but ultimately after seeing the device in person and learning what it would cost a month to operate, I decided it really wasn't something I needed.

But I still felt like I probably needed a new phone. So much has changed, and even if I wasn't going to have 50,000 apps at my fingertips, maybe I could have something that reliably synced with my address book. So I got a BlackBerry Curve. Before doing so, I asked the guy at the Sprint store, "I don't need to change anything on my plan, right? Because I like my plan. So if something has to change in order for me to use this, I don't want to get it."

"Well, let me run it through, and it'll tell me if something needs to change. (*gears turn, levers are pulled*) Nope! You're all good! Nothing changed!"

Me: "Great!"

Several minutes of activation-type stuff, I sign a sales slip, and I'm out the door with a shiny new phone, right?

Wrong.

Tonight as I'm setting it up, checking out all the stuff it can do, I decide to fire up the web browser.

"Your device does not currently have any Browser Configuration Service Book Entries. Please contact your service provider to enable the Browser on your device."

Okay, so I gotta call tech support. Maybe the guy didn't set everything up right. It happens. Tech support tells me, "Oh. You don't have the right data plan. The BlackBerry needs a separate data plan that's $20 a month."

Here we go.

So I get transferred to "Account Retention." The very fact that they call it that AND tell the customers that's what it's called is just such a giant fucking pile of fail. So you already know you've fucked up, and you have to hire a special unit of people whose sole job is to try to patch that fuck up. Nice business.

I speak to a very helpful woman in Account Retention, who informs me that yes, BlackBerry requires a different data plan, and she's so very sorry for the confusion. Okay, that's fine, but that's not what Sprint Employee #1 told me today at the Sprint Store (it's not like I bought this from some random dude on the street). "I'm sorry for the confusion sir." She offers to switch my lower, grandfathered data plan to Lisa's phone (saving us $10/month) plus changing the text messaging plan on Lisa's phone, saving us another $4/month, in order to offset (what she thinks) is a $30/month data plan for the BlackBerry. (Did you catch that? It's not $20/month, as Sprint Employee #2 told me. It's $30.)

As I'm briefly considering this, she informs me that the data plan for the BlackBerry is in fact $39.99/month, effectively re-couping the supposed savings by switching the data plan to Lisa's phone. Her explanation? She doesn't deal with BlackBerry accounts that often. Translation: I don't know how to do this job, which is why they stick me on graveyard shift on Sundays.

Typically I think some would describe it as a "bait and switch," if I'm not mistaken. Only I don't think they're saavy enough for a bait-and-switch. I think they're just incompetent and don't know what their services cost because that's the whole point.

So let's recap: In a matter of about 6 hours, we went from "No change!" to "Give us $20.95 more a month!" Now that's what I call customer satisfaction. And instead of a new phone, I get the pleasure of packing everything back up in a box and returning it.

Doin' a bang up job, Sprint.

A supervisor's voicemail informed me she'd return my call in 48-72 hours. I'm fairly certain I could be the customer of a different carrier in that amount of time.

(BTW, I understand the whole attraction, retention formula for customers. I'm sure I'm probably the type of customer Sprint wants to fire.)

UPDATE: So I've remained a Sprint customer, after calling back and getting to the bottom of the data plan clusterf0ck. No one really seems to know what's going on there, but I did speak to someone who seemed to know what she was doing. She explained that the $39.99 data plan includes tethering, something I definitely don't need. She also went ahead and actually made the changes to my wife's account the woman the night before claimed she HAD made, but didn't. Nice one, Sprint. And I do like the BlackBerry Curve.

The Palm Pre in Person

I swung by a Sprint store this afternoon to check out the Pre with my own two hands. A few things disappointed.

Sprint rep (who was rude) confirmed that I'd have to switch to one of their new plans in order to use the Pre. This would effectively double our current mobile phone bill, something I'm not at all interested in doing.

The store had two demo Pres, so I had to wait my turn to check out the goods. I'm not certain, but I think the other one wasn't running in a demo mode. The one I was able to monkey with didn't really do anything except run a few demo screens over and over. Not exactly the best way to test drive it.

The hardware does indeed feel "plastic-y" and slightly on the cheap side. I didn't really see the problems with the sliding motion I've read about in other reviews, though. The closed Pre is an incredibly small and sexy device, for what it's capable of doing. That was probably the most impressive bit.

Is this the device that will bring Palm back? Highly doubtful. The only major things it currently does over the iPhone is copy and paste (coming to the iPhone this week) and the ability to have multiple apps open, passive notifications, etc. These capabilities are most certainly in the roadmap for the iPhone, and are largely a function of processing power and battery life.

A note to Sprint reps (and customer service reps in general): When there's a customer in your store and they say they have a question, don't grunt at them and tell them you're with another customer, then attempt to patronize that customer by saying you'll answer any "quick" questions they might have. I've been a Sprint customer for nearly a decade, and they're very close to losing me. Really the only thing going for them is the cost of the current plan I have, and the fact that they're compteting in an industry rich in mediocrity.