Dear Sprint,
I am an extremely dissatisfied customer despite more than four years of paying my bills on time with your company. All I want is a refund of an erroneous charge, and your company is punishing me for being honest. The phone number in question is 580-XXX-XXXX.
I was recently charged $200 because my wife had to get one of our teenager's phone replaced, despite the fact that I already pay $7 per month for the insurance and paid the $50 deductible. When the charge appeared on our bill in October, I called Sprint and was transferred to Assurion. I told Assurion the truth -- that is, my wife mailed the broken phone according to the instructions included with the replacement phone. Assurion told me that I should see the refund in 1-2 billing cycles. Two cycles have passed, and yet no refund -- and Sprint is punishing me by classifying my payments as late, even though I have paid all other charges ahead of time.
I attempted to call today (31 Dec.) to get this matter corrected. The first supervisor was courteous, and attempted to get Assurion on the line -- a manager at Assurion put us on hold, then never returned and the call was dropped. I called and spoke to another Sprint supervisor, who immediately transferred me to Assurion without listening to my problem. Assurion again told me that I should see the refund on 1-2 billing cycles. I again called Sprint and was repeatedly told the very same information by a supervisor-drone named George (#619675), and that there was nothing he could do until Assurion received the broken phone. He told me he didn't care about my situation and that even if the phone got lost in the mail I would still be responsible for the $200 charge.
Note that I am an active duty Army officer and have been serving in Kuwait since March 2007. I have been a faithful Sprint customer since November 2004 and have never even once been late on a payment. However, in those 48 months I have had to make at least 45 separate phone calls over billing errors that your company cannot seem to get right (I wish I were making that number up). It seems that every time I make a change to my account, Sprint makes some new error that causes me to have to call and berate some underpaid representative who has deplorable customer service skills or speaks English as a third language. I'm sure George will drink himself into a stupor tonight just because he had to deal with me today.
The truth, the way I see it, is that I pay your company, not Assurion. You take a part of my money and give it to Assurion to insure my teenagers' phones so that when they break or lose them, I pay you another $50 so that Assurion sends me another phone. I should never have to talk to anyone in Assurion -- this should be a simple, one-stop process where I call Sprint, who handles every issue regarding the lost or broken phone. In the four years I've been a customer, I have easily paid over $1000 just in insurance, yet you want to charge me another $200 for a useless piece of junk that got lost in the mail.
I could have easily lied and told Assurion that the dog ate the phone so our unsuspecting preteen daughter threw it away right before the trash was picked up, or my teenager left the phone on the bus coming home from a swim meet and didn't realize it all weekend. That would have been more interesting and much less painful to deal with. In fact, I could call Assurion right now and concoct any story I want about finding the mailing envelope on the kitchen counter and realizing we really did drop the phone in the shark-infested water while snorkeling off Cozumel because we were too hung over from the previous night's two-for-one margaritas on the cruise ship -- and I would have my refund, no questions asked, even if my imaginary flight got stuck in Houston and a week's worth of Montezuma's revenge was more important than calling Sprint to replace some stupid phone.
But no, since I decided to tell the truth, to be honest and follow your instructions, you still want to charge me $200 for a useless piece of plastic and silicon gadgetry that probably cost you $1.50 in parts. I hope you at least paid poor George way more than that just to listen to me rant and berate him on the phone for an hour this morning.
Do the right thing -- refund my money now, plus the $.80 late fee and all associated taxes. Then I'll stop calling George and all his other customer service supervisor buddies and telling them they need to find another line of work. Either that, or cancel all my phones immediately without any "early termination fees," so I can take my business to a company that might at least have a clue what good customer service is.
