Shout Out to Sprint

For every 100 horrible customer service stories, there has to be one good one, but rarely does that one good one happen to me.

I have literally cried in frustration to some guy in India, begged someone on my 13th phone call to please just listen to me, worked my way through a forest of phone trees only to be told by a disembodied voice that I can't press 7. Click.

Now I have had customer service so good that I hardly believe it happened.

I have a mobile WiFi card from Sprint that inserts in a USB port. It worked fine Sunday night. It didn't work Monday morning. I fiddled and fussed with it for 45 minutes to get on line and then gave up and called Sprint.

I was thinking later that we will do anything the tech rep tells us to do... "Miss Luebke, stick a carrot in your ear while repeatedly pressing shift, control ###." Sure, I'd do that.

I went through all the exercises and it still wasn't working. I knew what was coming next: a trip to the Sprint store.

When she asked, "Is this a laptop?" I knew I'd be heading out.

So when she told me I'd have to go to the Sprint store, ALL I said was "Oh gee, that's not convenient for me." I had been totally neutral throughout our conversation, hadn't particularly bonded with her, but I had been pleasant. She says she has to talk to her supervisor.

To me "not convenient" means I can do it, but I wish I didn't have to.

She comes back on the phone a few times, always apologizing for having me on hold, and finally says that Sprint will send me a new device.

Send?

In fact, I'll cut to the chase and say they overnighted one to me (and I have to say I did NOT believe it would arrive). This morning, as promised, I got an email with a tracking number and sure enough my little package was on the truck out for delivery. (I was using dial up to get my email.)

The only thing I have to do is send Sprint back the old one, but she said there would be a postage-paid return envelope in the package for that purpose and there was.

I later got an email about this situation, and then read something like "we've outlined the costs you will be charged below..." and I didn't really care if they charged me something, would actually have gladly paid for the UPS Overnight, but each line had $0.00 in it.

When I installed the stick, everything seemed to work, but then I kept getting an error message.

I called Sprint and the nice woman (in the Phillipines it turns out) had to enter my "DSN Number" or some such 14-digit number on the back of the device to activate it or something. She did that, and I asked her to wait to make sure it worked. It did. I asked her to wait for me to sign off and sign on again. She did and even suggested I go to a few websites to be sure.

I am still in a state of shock that life can sometimes be this easy. So here's to Sprint! Of course, your experience with them may vary, as mine might next month or next year, but, man, is it nice to be treated like your business matters.

And, just from a marketing perspective, this event will keep me loyal to Sprint for a long time.