So I’ve had Sprint for about 4 years now and have overall been pretty satisfied with their customer service and website experience. Just like any other phone user, you don’t really have to interact with customer service until you have an issue or a problem. When I switched over from an older pixel to a pixel 4 XL, it was a pretty good sized pain. I did this just before I left Hawaii and went to a Sprint store. The in-store representatives were on a tech support line for about 2 hours. Honestly, I didn’t think anything of it really because I went and grabbed lunch and coffee at the time they were dealing with this. I didn’t realize how significant the problem was up until just a few days ago when I upgraded from the Pixel 4 XL to the new Pixel 6 pro. So what is this problem: The issue is dealing with the new eSIM card.
So I didn’t realize that the old phone had the eSIM card as well ( meaning it literally doesn’t have a physical SIM card). So this entails large amounts of time on customer service tech support in order to resolve the communication between your Sprint account and your phone if things don’t go smoothly.
So I did all of this online quite literally. I never stepped into a Sprint or T-Mobile store in order to purchase the new phone and then return or trade in the old phone. So I ordered it on my account. The Pixel 6 pro showed up relatively quickly. I backed up everything to an external hard drive as well as cloud. The transfer between the old Pixel and the new pixel actually was very easy.
Then a few days ago I tried to activate the new phone as I was boxing up the old phone to send it back as a trade-in. So the instructions were relatively simple which is follow prompts in order to activate the phone. The only way to communicate with customer service was through online chat. So anytime I had an issue or have to restart the phone I was then communicating with a new customer service rep that had no idea what I was going through or any issues I had prior to restarting the phone. It was massively frustrating.
So one large issue that was continual throughout the process of trying to activate the phone was an authentication SMS code that would not come through to the phone since the phone was not activated. Even as I’m sitting in front of my computer, I could not access my account during this time. So my only means of communication with my account was through the online chat through the phone that was not activated. The new phone was still able to partially function through Wi-Fi. I would think that there would be more than one way to communicate with customer service versus this. What would have made all of this a whole lot simpler is if there was an ability to be able to still access my account online on a computer while trying to activate the new phone that is having issues.
So after about 3 and 1/2 hours, four customer service reps and one technical support rep, someone was able to activate the phone. After the fifth reset of the phone, the phone was activated. I’m thinking that if I did have a physical SIM card, I may have avoided this head ache. I don’t know if other carriers have this level of frustration, but I know that the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint has not equated to a better customer service experience.
Previous Experience
So unfortunately this is not actually the first time I’ve experienced massive frustration with Sprint. Within the last 10 months or so I used to have a small business. All we really needed was a simple Wi-Fi hotspot for the office. The communication between Sprint and their business side (Sprint business) was probably some of the worst I’ve ever experienced. The two offices simply did not communicate when you purchase the hotspot with your personal account and then want to separate the hotspot to a business account. This transaction led to days of arguing between Sprint customer service and Sprint business customer service. The frustration was high. Very high.
So once all of that was all ironed out, I tried to complain to any form of higher up management that would listen. These complaints of the frustration led to absolutely nothing. So at the end such a huge business with millions of clients, they don’t really care to sort out such a small problem that certainly is a huge problem with many clients. End rant.
