What the E!

In the continued saga of my effort to remove charges from third party SMS company, Cyclon, LLC, that I mentioned in my last couple of blog posts (1, 2, 3) I may have finally reached a resolution.

When I called Sprint I was extremely fortunate to reach and agent named Lisa. She was able to remove the charges from my bill and then blocked any bills from other third party SMS companies for other lines on my account. However, to stop the bills for Cylon she mentioned something that may be helpful to others calling, “Opt Out”. Lisa mentioned that she had just learned from another customer service agent that you need to “Opt Out” and block to prevent charges to an account that may have already “subscribed” to one of these fraudulent services. Hopefully this is the last call I will have to make related to this issue.

So the keywords for anyone getting ready to call Sprint on this issue are Opt Out and Block.

As a followup to the update on my experience with Sprint customers service I received a phone survey today.  It was specifically asking about my experience on Monday.  So I gave the person reasonable review since they were so helpful.  Overall, customer service number not so great. 

Just now I logged on to my sprint account to check out my usage and guess what I found:

03/14 Cylon LLC: Alerts - Info Text 38146

Round Two of customer service roulette is just getting ready to take place, arggh!

Here is an update from my earlier post. Never received a response from the “Customer Escalation Support Team.” So I decided to push my luck and call again.

Talked with a really nice lady name Shannon today. Explained my situation and frustration at the lack of response. She was able to refund the charge, block future charges, and was very pleasant to deal with on top of it all. Took less than 7 minutes from the time that I started calling to finish. If only Sprint could clone her, they might have more customers.

I guess the morale of the story is if the first agent you talk with isnt helpful, just hang up and try again. As a side note calling in the early afternoon seems to lead to short wait times.

I have been a long time Sprint customer, over 6 years now. I have 4 lines on my account and include data for a couple of the phones. Sprint gets a fair amount of money from each month. They have even included me in there “Premier Sprint Customer” program which is supposed to provide me with something, but it really looks like a program to send me more ads each month.

Well this month I was checking my bill (like I normally have to due to the frequent errors) and I find a charge form “Cylon LLC: Alerts - Info Text 38146 - 02/13” for $9.99 on one of the lines. I dig a little deeper and find out they are basically a text fraud company that sends texts out and when you open them they “subscribe” you to the plan for $9.99 a month. You can check one of the many links related to the company here: Cylon LLC Complaints - Theft thru Cellphone Text Messages.

Well I call Sprint customer service, enter my phone number, the customer service representative asks for my phone number again, my name, and my security question. Then as soon as I saw I have a billing issue and Cylon LLC she intermediately starts to explain how I need to text them back to unsubscribe and how I will get a credit or refund on my bill in the next 2 to 3 billing cycles. It took her more time to confirm my name from the computer system then to respond to my question (probably wasn’t reading off a script on this one).

I ask her to credit my account right now, so my credit card is not charged for the $9.99. This is where the fun starts. As with most things Sprint, the person you are talking to cant actually do anything to help solve your problem. So I ask to speak to someone who can solve my problem or talk to the cancellation department (better know as I can actually solve your problem department). The customer service agent then says “Ok” and I am put on hold for 3 to 4 minutes. Then another person comes online from the cancellation department and asks for my phone number. I ask her if she can reverse charges from Cylon LLC and she says “No”. So I ask to speak to her manager, which turns out is the Sprint Escalation Support line (didnt know that people are managed by a voicemail box, but that could explain some of Sprint’s problems). I will keep things updated to see if I actually get a response.

Why is it so hard to provide reasonable customer service? Sometimes you get lucky and get somebody really good on the line and they do an excellent job, but normally one call leads to 3 or 4 more. I am eligible for an upgrade, but I really wont consider it since I have to pay more than a new customer for my phone (unless I threaten to cancel) and they normally mess up the billing and I lose another 2 to 3 hours on the phone with customer service until I get lucky and get someone that can actually solve my problem! So much for being a “Sprint Premier” customer.