North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Sprint Cellular: The Final Insult


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