Complaint Review: Sprint - Reston Virginia

We have been a good Nextel customer for many, many years - long before the merger with Sprint. I believe our original contract with Nextel started back in the 1990s.

We are now very, very dissatisfied customers. This is due to a number of reasons: decreasing service quality that includes poor, dropping out of words and/or muffled speech when talking on your phone, many dropped calls, many areas very near us that we travel to frequently where we can not get a signal, and problems using a Motorola Bluetooth (we have tried 2 different new ones) with the Samsung phone that makes it sound like we're talking in a tin can.

Here is some background information supporting my case. Back in July 2007, after noticing a decline in service over the past 4 years, I called the Nextel tech support people to see what could be done about the decline in service. I asked if any new towers were going up and the tech looked & saw that no new towers were scheduled to be put up or worked on in our area. We had been noticing that the walkie-talkie feature in our local town would be down for a day or so at a time on several occasions within a few months. We had noticed more & more dropped calls. We noticed many dead zones. Our grown children, who had previously been Nextel customers, had all changed to other vendors because of the same poor quality issues we were experiencing and our grown children were the ones that convinced us to change to Nextel to begin with!

The bottom line was that the tech support person suggested that we get Sprint phones because Sprint had many more towers & would provide us with better coverage.

So in July 2007, we went to the local Sprint store located in the same town we live in and the Sprint representative spent alot of time, several hours, with us in the store, listening to the problems we were having & making suggestions. The Sprint representative's bottom line was for us to convert to Sprint only phones & we would definitely have better coverage and better quality service. It required that we purchase 2 new phones, which we had to manually put in all of our telephone numbers and a new 2-year contract (as well as pay a fee for the phones & wait months for the rebates to come in the mail).

We were very hesitant about signing a new contract because we were already having problems with the service, but the Sprint store representative, who seemed very genuine, assured us that this change would be a big improvement & we would be very happy with our phones. He indicated that he was able to make and receive calls from the areas where we were having difficulties so we were encouraged, although reluctant, to sign the 2 year contract. We did sign the contract. We regret it now.

My husband immediately bought a Motorola blue-tooth device, but noticed right away that the phone sounded even worse. We had bought the Bluetooth online & talked to the same Sprint store representative & he suggested we contact Motorola directly about replacing it because it may have not been a legitimate Motorola device, even though it was in Motorola packaging. The Sprint store rep said there was a huge problem with people copying their products. So by the time we received the 2nd Motorola Bluetooth, our 30 day trial period was up and the new Blue Tooth didn't sound much better than the first. They both sounded like poor quality devices. We weren't sure if it was the phones, the phone service, the Blue Tooth, a combination of these things, but we DID know that we were definitely noticing a decrease in the quality of our service.

About a year ago, I had called to increase my service plan (because I was going over in my minutes) and was never told that the change in my plan automatically would add 2 more years onto my contract. I feel like important information was not given to me about the implications of changing my service and it should have been. That is just wrong.

Now to the current time - Dec 2007. Yesterday, my husband's new boss said to him that they had to get my husband's (George) phone fixed because the boss couldn't deal with the poor quality anymore. So during business hours, my husband, who is an executive, was taken to a non-Sprint wireless store by his boss to purchase a new wireless phone for him and port over his wireless number over.

Knowing that I have suffered the same service quality issues, I decided to change vendors too. The addition complaints I had received from numerous people was that when I am talking in the phone, it sounds like I was breathing into the phone & it is hard to have a conversation with me because of that. I am also a professional and can not afford my reputation to be tarnished by cheap-sounding wireless products.

After checking with several friends who have had wireless service with the same vendor for awhile, we found several friends and colleagues who all were impressed with a particular wireless vendor so I am in the process of porting my service over to that wireless vendor.

We had been good & loyal Nextel/Sprint customers for a long time. We followed the suggestions that their company's representatives made and in good faith signed a contract which we feel like Sprint has not held up its end of the bargain (by providing decent quality wireless service.) We are not expecting perfect service. We are reasonable about what is acceptable and what is not. What we have been dealing with is not acceptable and is certainly not quality.

My request to Sprint was simple. I want the $200 early termination fee x 2 (for both my husband, George, and myself) to be waived or adjusted. I believe that our circumstances are legitimate and that we have kept up our end of the contract and that it is Sprint that has not performed as promised.

I have not been able to get satisfaction talking with customer relations or the retentions department and all the supervisors in those departments. Everyone has either said they don't have the authority to adjust it or that I owe it & they won't adjust it because I signed the contract. I have tried to escalate this matter, but it still remains unresolved. I will spare you the details of how many people I have talked to since & how many hours I have spent on the phone trying to get a satisfactory resolution, but it is alot.

The last supervisor said, after a lengthy, but polite conversation, that he could only submit a request for someone to call me back within 72 hours because no supervisor higher than he was available in the retentions department that I was transferred to. (I had to dial *2 from my phone and then be transferred to retentions. They won't give out a number to the public. I wonder why!) I asked for a number to call for the corporate office or the president's office, but this supervisor said he couldn't provide anything that I hadn't already tried. I highly doubt I will hear back from anyone. After looking online, I found the 703-433-4000 corporate number & after a 40 minute conversation I was finally given a general looking email address and no numbers to call - no people to talk to that could help.

I am disheartened that having been a good customer for all these years has meant nothing when the relationship with Sprint/Nextel was ending.

Lori

Island Lake, Illinois

U.S.A.

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