This is not a technical review. My wife and I are brand new to the world of smart phones. We are not however, new to the world of customer service or it's function. We purchased our first smart phones at a Cricket kiosk on Jan 1st of this year. The first road block was the transfer of our old flip phones which we acquired through AT&T many many many years ago. My wife responded to an ad that when presented, were told did not apply to us due to our being existing AT&T customers. This WAS the reason we went to Cricket in addition to a reasonable monthly plan. This is not only deceptive advertising but once again it relies on the customer to closely examine the fine print (if any) and quite frankly should be at least as big as the $100 credit promise, not to mention buying one phone and getting the second one free......none of which we received. We were after all getting a new service but because we were coming over from AT&T, we 'got nutin'. Note to AT&T customers considering the switch.........no deals here.
I'm not done though. One of the many questions we had was billing. Once they told us we would be on AT&T's network I ask if we would get a bill from AT&T or them. The young 20 something girl replied "oh, we never bill". I asked if we would get a bill from AT&T. She either didn't know or said no, I'm not sure now but given the glazed over look I received, I drop it. You have to understand we were getting a new device pretty foreign to us and we were more excited about that, pretty much thinking things would work out with billing. Part of the process is paying for service up front so I knew at some point we would get a bill in February. We opted out of 'auto-pay' as we like to receive physical bills IN THE MAIL and pay them accordingly. When we opted out, this is what we thought or assumed would happen.
Imagine my surprise when I got a text from Cricket, the same company that "never bills".........saying I had 2 days to pay. WTF? This on Jan 28th. Blood pressure rising, I called "customer service" and got a moron named 'Alejandro' who read from a script and was of zero help. I asked for a manager but his reply was "they will say the same thing." Not giving up quite yet, I asked him if I could at least change the pay date to which he replied "no". Livid with anger I went online to the 'chat' and got another idiot name 'Javier' who was also very unhelpful. He seemed completely incapable of understanding my questions regarding the process of receiving a paper bill, the misinformation we were given at the kiosk and how important it was to us to have billing choices we thought we had. His links for what, I have no idea, were given without explanation and I ended the session completely frustrated.
But it gets better......beaten down, I go online and go into our account hoping to find more info. I immediately find you can change the due date indicating to me 'Alejandro' was in fact a moron or insufficiently trained to do his job. Seeing there are NO alternatives to pay my bill I decide to go ahead and do it online, jumping through the hoops of modernism , the new world order or whatever.
That was fun. As of this writing the issue has not been resolved. I attempted no fewer than 12 times, to pay my bill using their system. Feeling like I am to blame and that I am the moron, I get on the horn again and walk through the payment process with no success. The person on the other end is of course blaming me and blaming my card, insisting it is on my end. I told him to toss off and get a "manager on the line". She gets on the line and is unable to help me as well and says she needs to have a conference and will call me back in 20 minutes. She never did call back. After 40 minutes, I call back and talk to a 'Jenny' who is actually very helpful and patient and came close to what I consider "customer service". She is however unable to help me. She was able to process a payment on her end but I was not. We tried for over an hour to figure it out and she finally admitted there may be a system problem. At this point, I cannot make a payment or set up auto pay. Jenny says she will call me on Wednesday (not sure why) with claims the problem may be resolved by then.
In conclusion I would like to say my experience was laughable at best. In the interest of keeping this short I left out many details relating to what I was told 'in detail' and the manner in which I was treated. Very poor customer service staffed with people who have poor training. read more
