Customer service horrible

I had the same exact issue.  I was told the store did not have any to exchange with and after a 2 hour customer service call I found out the store did have some and would exchange it.  Make sure you don't get your call outsourced overseas.  They will not care what your issue is.  Make sure you get a Rep from the USA or Canada.  I found this out the hard way.  After a lot of calling and hanging up I was able to get Both EVO's replaced at a store That "didn't Have Any".  Just call and hang up until you get a rep that will do the "right thing".

I've sent phones back to Sprint and the conversation typical starts with, "I want to cancel my service" then they transfer me to the retentions department. From there, they send me a phone and I send one back. I have NEVER been charged for this. What they say is, if we don't get the old phone back in X number of days we will charge you up to XX dollars.

That's the saddest part about Sprint customer service. Some of the people are really great and others are the worst ever. Sprint has an ad that states, "Our customer service is much improved." Every time I see that ad, I think, you were at the bottom of the barrel, therefore, any improvement is great. One should not have to call back multiple times to receive good customer service. UGH.

Having worked in a call center, I think 3 simple things (well, simple from our perspective) would make such a massive difference in the Customer Service we receive we likely wouldn't recognize it anymore.

1. Stop requiring unreasonably short average call times. When you encounter a particularly bad mood rep, what you can't see is the supervisor standing over them tapping her nail on the top of the partition wall and motioning to her watch indicating the rep has to wrap up the call now, they've taken too much time. Or some variation of this. It's incredibly common. Doing collections for Sprint/Nextel, our average call times were expected to be under 2.5 minutes. Great if someone wanted to make a payment, disaster if someone had a genuine problem and needed help.

2. Pay to attract bright, intelligent people, and then give them the tools to fix things. Most reps are monkeys given scripts. On occasion you find a few that actually learn extra things not in the scripts that can help.

3. Stop making every little thing it's own department. Seriously. Train the reps to help the customer, period. Stop segregating everything and spreading the power to do something so thin no one is able to actually do anything.

I got out of call center Customer Service in part for these 3 reasons. Tired of getting in trouble for actually helping people because it took longer. Got paid for crap and barely got trained. I trained myself by learning with every call. And segregating departments, it's crap. Should be one stop, fixed.

But of course, all this costs cash. And since people in general put up with bad customer service cause most companies (not all, but most) are on the same level of bad, they'll continue to do it.

Mind you, this is just generalizing. I've actually gotten quite good service from Sprint in the last few years, except for a couple reps. They weren't rude, but clueless. Anytime I've gotten a rude attitude, it's been from a supervisor believe it or not.

Wow... short call time requirement and I thought hotel reservations was the only one required it, I never understood why they want short call times and I still don't understand except they want to be able to serve more customers I guess.

I will never take another job doing call center work, I had to be able to sell (or cross sell) a hotel room in under 3 minutes and we had a script to go by and I'd say about 50% of the time this worked because the caller was either A) looking for a hotel in their specific area B) they have a price in mind or C) the room was not available or D) they wanted another hotel brand that we sell and does not realize we can cross sell them so they end up calling back again  :

Reservation cancellations were not rare, but they were uncommon because most of the times the guest would contact the hotel directly.  The only time my calls would go outside the 3 minute window were A) customers who couldn't get a room at the hotel they wanted were shopping while on the phone (although I could have directed them to check online and call us back bad idea) and B) there was some other problem and then at that point I'd have to transfer them to another call center where they exclusively handled complaints and they'd whine about the fact I couldn't help them.

Anyway... I agree if they had trained us to handle complaints and resolve issues, though I guess these kinds of companies would rather train those people exclusively otherwise if you're cross trained you might get confused in policies and so on and on I guess.

Its one thing to be clueless and being helpful and not being rude vs being rude and clueless in my book the former is better because the customer will feel that they are being helped even if the agent is not knowledgable at the time (Heh I remember my very first reservation call I had a guy keep telling me that I was new, and I didn't know what I was doing and I'd screw it up, I reassured him that yes I was new and I would do my best to keep it simple even if I had to get help which I didn't need to ).

My friend had a problem with her EVO 4G she talked to customer service ok. They tell her they will call rt back.. guess what they never did now that terrible. Sprint going to poop on customer service on the phone better go to a store.