This is how I still feel after about 4-5 months post graduation.
As the son of a Sprint employee, I’ve had the chance to enjoy a few benefits from Sprint’s Advantage Family package: once a year upgrades, 500-minutes per person (though the overages are hefty), free Vision plan, and a nice flat-rate monthly $20/person.
The down side? Sprint’s phone selection has never been that great. They were very stingy about warranty (my air card stopped working roughly 2 days after the one year mark and they refused to fix it for free).
All of this seemed reasonable, however, since the benefits outweighed the costs. Yet, we head down to the Sprint store this afternoon to switch my mom and sister’s phones. We wanted to do this at a Sprint store because that way both could keep their old data intact while switching to each other’s respective phones.
The gatekeeper in the front was courteous, but what happened with the representative assigned to us was a whole different story. My mom’s specific words were, “We want to swap these phones and keep our old data.” The representative doesn’t verify with us what we want to do, only nodding his head, and proceeds to wipe out all data from my mom’s phone.
Let’s step back a minute here for the sake of common sense. Why would we take time out of a busy work day to swap phones to come to a Sprint store? It’s for the sake of convenience. We want the store employees to swap the data so that we don’t have to input our contacts in manually. Otherwise, we could just as easily just call Sprint CS by phone (which is another story of pain and suffering that I won’t go into) and have them deactivate then activate the phones.
So obviously, my mom’s angered for a good reason. She has all her business contacts on her phone wiped off cleanly. Her old phone holds some of the old contacts, but a portion of them made in the last few months are gone. She’s also not the most technology literate person, so of course she only gets more frustrated when the guy repeatedly hammers the same phrase, “You should have them if you enabled mobile backup!”
Our emotionless, unapologetic representative with an undeserved sense of pride would only continue to state that (a) he did indeed ask us if we were sure this is what we wanted to do, and (b) that it basically wasn’t his fault. Given that we raised a bit of a ruckus and turned many heads, it was finally about 10 minutes into the struggle that we forced an apology out of him (a very half-assed one at that).
Another minor detail in this whole debacle is that fact that when we ask to see the store manager, none of the employees feel the least bit threatened. What does that say about Sprint’s company culture? Basically this: “We’ve dealt with this so many times now, and we still get customers! So it doesn’t matter if you complain! We can deal with the loss of one customer. No big deal.”
The very least this guy could have done was at least pretend that he felt sorry and that he was wrong. He couldn’t even give us that much. With the way Sprint’s infrastructure continues to crumble and their complete lack of R&D, it’s a shame given how promising it was in the 90s. Remember those 10 call commercials with the pin dropping on the ground?
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“People who are suffering don’t need advice, diagnoses, interpretations and interventions. They need sincere and complete empathy—attention. Once they have the feeling that the other person is putting themselves in their shoes, they are able to let go of their suffering and head down the path of healing. Attention—being completely available—may well be the most coveted gift. We silently hope that someone will want to do that for us. Pure attention is given without judgement and without advice. Attention is a type of friendliness and the lack thereof is the worst kind of rudeness. Attention is the means that allows us to let friendliness flow. Anyone who can’t give others attention, will never be friendly. Attention gives energy, while the lack of attention takes it away.” — http://dialogicmediation.com/2009/09/03/more-on-listening-like-a-cow/