I’ve had multiple sessions with Verizon customer service agents via chat (which as a communications mode sucks, but that’s a separate rant), and they have messed up big time, repeatedly.
I won’t go into details, but it involves repeated assurances that a charge for a mistaken addition of international service to my daughter’s phone line would be erased and would not appear on our family’s monthly bill.
Well, lo and behold, we get our itemized bill that’s due in early January, and that charge still appears. In anticipation of this f**k up, I took several screen shots, most notably of the chat sessions, that show that this issue was supposedly resolved.
So, I will save some money by canceling our now month-to-month service with Verizon and switching to Sprint (just like the TV ads show). But I won’t do so if Sprint’s customer service is just as bad as Verizon’s.
Any horror stories about Sprint? Or any good experiences?
Check your coverage in your area first. We have Sprint and I have friends with Verizon. As long as we’re in the cities, we’re great. Perfect. Rarely a dropped call too. We bought land 90 minutes north of us and get absolutely no signal there whereas my friends with Verizon have no issue whatsoever.
My wife just yesterday had the single worst customer service experience of her life at the company-owned Sprint store at 3513 W Devon Ave in Chicago. An hour long wait to receive rude, abusive service. By contrast, she went to a Best Buy and got amazing service. It’s no wonder Sprint is in last place.
Technically, Sprint has been great - perfect coverage for the area I’m in (Chicago and Kansas City). But I’ll always get their service from a 3rd party MVNO. Right now, I have Sprint via RingPlus.net. I get unlimited calling and texts and 8 gigs of data a month for $26.
Don’t switch to any major carrier. Use an MVNO and prepaid. If you have a lot of lines, generally cricket is the cheapest (uses AT&T towers). One or two lines, T-Mobile prepaid, Straight Talk, Cricket, Google Fi, several others are all competitive depending on your exact usage. Under no circumstances is postpaid service ever competitive as far as I can tell, which is strange considering they lock you into a contract and prepaid doesn’t.
Jacob mentioned it in passing, but give a look to Google’s Project Fi. They are the only service that switches between providers on the fly; their phones can connect to T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, and wifi; they connect with whoever has the best signal. And their data is (basically) pay-as you-go, you pick the data plan you think you need; if you don’t use it all they refund you some of the cost, and if you go over they just charge you the same $10/GB as you’d pay for the rest of the data.
The downside is that you are limited to one of three phones, the Google Pixel/Pixel XL ($), the mid=price Nexus 5P, and the cheaper Nexus 5X.
I bought a Nexus 5X with the intention of using Google Fi, but then I learned about RingPlus. You have to constantly check their promotions, but when you get a good one, it’s a remarkable deal.
My current deal, which gets me Sprint service without having to deal with Sprint, costs $26 a month for unlimited talk, unlimited text, unlimited MMS and 8 gigs of 4G data, dropping down to 2G for the rest of the month.
Everyone else is offering a lot less data for a lot more money. As everywhere I go has WiFi, and Kansas City is pretty much blanketed in free WiFi, I’m going to be hard pressed to use the full 8 gigs.
Their current best deal is unlimited talk/text/MMS and 10 gigs 4G for $35 + $10 activation fee.
I guess I should discuss the price point on Project Fi.
Their base plan for one person is $20 + $10/GB per month. With their service always preferencing wi-fi when it’s available, I use less than one gig per month. Whatever you don’t use is subtracted from your next bill. If you use more, you’re still charged the standard flat rate.
They finally have a family plan now, so my husband and I are both together on that plan for $35 base rate per month + $10/GB per month. We average one GB between the two of us so we’re talking about $45/month for two people, compare to the ridiculous $125+/month we paid with Verizon – and my husband didn’t even have a smart phone at the time. And happily, there is no contract commitment with Project Fi, if you don’t like it you can just leave.
The catch is with Project Fi you have to buy the phones, and they only offer a few models. You can buy the phones outright or you can space the payments out, interest-free, for 24 months. You can also buy those models of phone somewhere else and they will send you a SIM card for it. You could probably buy a refurbished Nexus for cheaper if you were really worried about the cost of a new phone. Mine is $16/month. You can’t do the full cost comparison without factoring in the cost of the phones, but with my math I still come out saving significant amounts of money vs. Verizon.
Then there’s just the stupid quirky awesomeness of Google. Last Christmas they sent us a free lego kit with instructions to build a phone dock out of legos.
I paid $269 for my Nexus 5X. It’s the “small” one, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want a bigger phone. I’m prepared to move to Google Fi if my needs change, or if I star working in an area where Sprint doesn’t have good coverage. I suspect most of the people complaining about their cell phone networks live in suburbs, where they all want good cell coverage but don’t want “those ugly cell towers.”
What kind of life have I been living that I’ve never heard of Google Fi until now? The prices seem entirely reasonable, and it would appear the Pixel doesn’t suck.
T-Mobile is the worst thing ever. I’ve mainly stayed on due to a combination of laziness and knowing no other carrier will be any better, but Google, the company I try my best to hate, seems to once again be doing stuff better than other folks.
The Pixel has been getting great reviews, most of which rate it equal or better than the iPhone 7. The main advantage of the Pixel and Nexus lines is that both are updated frequently, and are generally the most secure Android phones.
Yep, I agree and I have worked Sprint Customer Support back in the day when they were actually trying to improve it. The problem was a lack of consistently on what they actually considered good customer support and it changed with the blowing of the wind it seemed and no one was ever truly on the same page.
Things might be different now but it seems to me that coverage and price should be your goal with a wireless carrier. It matters little how bad customer service if you never need to call them in the first place.
The only thing that makes me a bit nervous is I think they are phasing out Nexus. I also have the 5x and it is a great, reasonably priced phone. Pixels are way more expensive. I’ve started saving already for my next phone as I figure it will be a Pixel.
I’ve never used their customer service because I’ve never had need to. It’s about the least complicated system to navigate. But my Aunt and Uncle have. When they started their service my relatives accidentally screwed up whose line was whose… This was early beta mode so they were limited in what they could do. They resolved the issue and gave them a sizeable credit on their phone bill. It was these folks who recommended the service to us. I’m not sure if there is still a wait list… Took about 3 months to get my invite.
I used to have great luck with Verizon reps. Then recently I had to call back 4 times to resolve a billing issue. I think what worked was getting confirmation numbers after a rep told me something and continuing to call back and speak to different reps and giving them that confirmation number.
My problem was I was promised a certain rate in November and I didn’t get that rate on the next bill. First rep acted helpless but finally said she would try to get it fixed and email me and let me know what she could do. That sounded dubious but I relented.
After no email (of course) a second rep a few days later said a bunch of roundabout stuff that amounted to there was nothing she could do. I nicely asked to speak to her supervisor, and she said they were all in a meeting. I said “So you’re not going to let me speak to a supervisor?” and she hung up.
I called right back. A different rep put me on hold for 10 min looking up my records, I finally asked if he was still there and he said they were having computer problems and to call back.
Fourth rep a few days later was polite and helpful and got me a rate that was less than I’ve paid in years.
All I can figure about the Pixel is that management at Google looked at the iPhone 7 and thought “Why should we have a reasonably priced phone? Apple has obviously set the price for a state-of-the-art phone - why shouldn’t we get huge profit margins as well?” Hopefully by the time my Nexus 5X is either dead or no longer being updated, they’ll have a reasonably priced Pixel.
The very few times I’ve called Straight Talk’s customer service, they’ve been helpful. No billing issues because they’re pre-paid. It’s been technical issues such as not having any data. They’ve usually resolved this by giving me a new APN to enter into my phone.