Cellular phones topics - Re: WTMA ***** on cellular!

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Re: WTMA ***** on cellular!

support@sellcom.com

2007-01-06, 10:33 pm

Larry <noone@home.com> spake thusly and wrote:

>Service is pretty bad when a radio guy will mention his experiences on the
>radio.....that depends on spot ads for income.....and usually says nothing.

I was truly astounded by the incompetence of Sprint cellular.
I was trying to find a way for someone to keep both of their
phone numbers as we are moving some of our land lines to cellular
using the Dock-n-talk and canceling some more land lines. We
were dummies paying for a land line just to forward it to a cell.

I was trying to find out if one can forward calls inside the
family plan for free. (they have a thing that they charge 20
cents a minute for forwarding, cute eh?). So after spending
forever on hold, and stuff like "Is there someone there who
speaks English?" etc.. I decided to try their web chat service
and explained the situation. The reply I got was "I don't
understand, what is forward?". I finally gave up.

In all fairness, also, in dealing with Alltel, I spoke to at
least 4 or 5 people who ALL gave me totally conflictory
information (I finally got a manager who got us set up).

Steve
--
www.sellcom.com for firewood splitters, ergonomic chairs,
office phone systems, "non-mov" surge protection, Exabyte,
CA, Minuteman, Brave Products, Fisch, TMC, Panasonic and more
http://www.phonelabs.biz cellphone docking now here!

Larry

2007-01-06, 10:33 pm

support@sellcom.com wrote in news:fukvp2d95tacsfm
3tsqlnlovq23lt61fhi@

4ax.com:

> In all fairness, also, in dealing with Alltel, I spoke to at
> least 4 or 5 people who ALL gave me totally conflictory
> information (I finally got a manager who got us set up).
>
>

I think all the carriers suffer from special treatment overload. They
all treat this customer different from that customer because this
customer has one phone and this other guy is CEO of IBM who buys
thousands of phones. There are so many plans and special, undocumented,
way to treat each customer, the TSRs have no idea what TODAY'S special
treatment plan for this tier of customer actually is, because they all
keep changing over and over. So, you get connected with Sally, a
clueless newbie that knows what the basic plan layout is, but doesn't
know about Plan X she, probably, could put you on if she, herself, only
knew about it. If you got Sue, when you called, who has been with the
company since it was called Mama's Cellular and Tire, Inc., she knows all
the plans and what she can do for you. Sue just codes in 29746, 49372,
29918, 58739, 27385B in the hidden special treatment codes page of the
hideously complex computer program and presses ENTER. There, now you
have 1200 minutes of nationwide service for $29/month with unlimited N/W,
M2M, 100 unlimited numbers to dial, including T1 speed cellular internet
ok for downloading. Sally doesn't even know where this program page is
because it's hidden from most of them....

Alltel kept eating my 100 minutes of free extra time at the beginning of
each month, even on M2M and N/W free time, I got in a promo. I tried 3
people to fix it, each month it returned just like it was. Person 4
collared a manager who just happened to be crossing the sales floor and
asked him, who'd been with Alltel from 3 companies ago, and he says, "Oh,
that's not right. Let me sit there for a second." She got up, he sat
down, clicked a few keys, entered a few codes into the billing system and
my problem was cured in less than 60 seconds flat! Sally was watching,
but I could see from her expression she was watching something NEW to
her...(c; Now my promo 100 minutes doesn't get eaten by free time at
all. It's all in the wrist action...at the keyboard. I'm convinced you
can get free unlimited cell/internet/video if you have the right billing
codes with any of these carriers.....and the person who knows how.

Larry

2007-01-06, 10:33 pm

support@sellcom.com wrote in news:fukvp2d95tacsfm
3tsqlnlovq23lt61fhi@

4ax.com:

> "non-mov" surge protection

By the way, we had this at a little country AM station I used to engineer
for. There were 2 trailer hitch balls, one on the hot tower antenna and
one on the ground system about 1" apart across the base insulator. One
direct hit did melt one of the trailer hitch balls, but I replaced that.
No MOVs were destroyed by any direct hit...(c;

Steven J. Sobol

2007-01-06, 10:33 pm

In article < Xns98B098FAEF4B2noon
ehomecom@208.49.80.253>, Larry wrote:

> I think all the carriers suffer from special treatment overload. They
> all treat this customer different from that customer because this
> customer has one phone and this other guy is CEO of IBM who buys
> thousands of phones.

I don't think that's unfair. If you're paying me $5000 per month for
my services, and some other customer is paying me $75, you *should*
expect to get the red carpet treatment. and he probably should not.

I think, and perhaps you guys could comment on this, that there is a
*baseline* even for people spending $1.98 per month, and that this
baseline customer service standard often isn't met. For example, by
Sprint, towards me, after their merger with Nextel. Unlike an awful
lot of other people, I'd had good experiences with them, and then they
outsourced frontline customer service to a bunch of flaming idiots. I
left Sprint in '05 after having left Verizon exactly a year earlier.

I hear Sprint's improved greatly since then - but it's too little, too
late.

> There are so many plans and special, undocumented,
> way to treat each customer, the TSRs have no idea what TODAY'S special
> treatment plan for this tier of customer actually is, because they all
> keep changing over and over.

I think this is a huge problem. I encountered it a couple times with
Verizon, although only a couple times, because I didn't really have
anything special on my account and I was always on a plan that hadn't
been grandfathered.

> Alltel kept eating my 100 minutes of free extra time at the beginning of
> each month, even on M2M and N/W free time, I got in a promo. I tried 3
> people to fix it, each month it returned just like it was. Person 4
> collared a manager who just happened to be crossing the sales floor and
> asked him, who'd been with Alltel from 3 companies ago

Funny thing, that. Alltel is also suffering from mergeritis, or so it seems.
Starting with their original deal with Verizon, they'd been growing
slowly but steadily, and then they bought up one of the largest
non-nationwide carriers in the country -- Western Wireless. As a
result, they're now one of the five largest US carriers, and the third
or fourth owner of the CellularONE brand. I suspect that as they
continue to grow, you'll see some (more?) of the same problems the big
guys have.

--
Steve Sobol, Professional Geek ** Java/VB/VC/PHP/Perl ** Linux/*BSD/Windows
Victorville, California PGP:0xE3AE35ED

It's all fun and games until someone starts a bonfire in the living room.

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