My daughter finally received her replacement phone from Straight Talk today. I really didn’t like the idea of sending the old phone in without having the new one in my hands first just because of all the runaround they’d given us already, but even after talking to their corporate office, we were left with no other choice.
We were told on Tuesday that they were going to ship the replacement phone via overnight mail and when it hadn’t arrived by Thursday we called back and discovered that, for reasons that nobody could explain, it had never been shipped. The person on the phone promised to escalate the ticket(which they claimed had been closed, by the way) and get it shipped via overnight mail on Thursday. By my count, that means it should have been here on Friday, but it arrived today. At least it arrived, right?
In the box with the new phone was a one-page instruction sheet explaining that if your old phone had already been activated then in order to activate this phone it would be necessary to dial *22890 and select menu option 1. I cringed when I saw the number I was expected to dial, but I did it anyway and verified that there are NO menu options. There weren’t any menu options the first six times their tech support people tried to “service” me and there still weren’t. Just a recording that says, “Please wait while your phone is programmed”. This time, however, the recording informed me that it was unable to program the phone and I’d have to call and let their people “service” me again.
Since I didn’t want to deal with those people again, and since my daughter needs to learn how to deal with situations like this, we let her call the corporate office and I went to take a nap. It took her two hone calls, but she managed to get the phone activated. It was suggested to her that she call back and verify that they gave her the credit for the three weeks she couldn’t use the phone. She dialed *611 which is the automated thingamajig that tells you your balance. The automated system claimed that it was unable to do what it was designed to do and forwarded her call to Customer Service.
Customer Service kept my daughter on the phone for five or ten minutes collecting all sorts of information and then they tried to talk her through the process of activating her phone. She told this idiot no less than five times that the phone was already activated and she was talking on it at the moment. They refused to hear her and continued telling her to dial *22890. Eventually my wife took over the call and used the theory that anyone can understand English if it’s spoken loudly enough to make certain that they got the idea the phone was activated. She was eventually able to discover that they did, in fact, credit her with the lost time, but again, the woman wanted to activate the phone and get contact info that my daughter had JUST given to the corporate office. My wife simply said, “You have answered my question. Thank you very much” and hung up.
Does Straight Talk only hire people who cannot speak English and refuse to listen? One gets that impression.
Here’s hoping that we never have to call and get “serviced” by them again!
Technorati Tags: gripes, straight+talk, cell+phones, customer+service, incompetence
