The Incredible Incompetence of Discover and Sprint

[billroper]

So it's like this. Back in April, I got a letter from Discover announcing that they were changing my card number, closing the existing card, and that they would contact all of the people who were autobilling items to the card so that I was not inconvenienced by this. daisy_knotwise, who was a banker up until recently, looked at this and said, "Sounds like they had a security breach somewhere."

All of my autobillings continued to show up on the statement under my new card number, so I assumed that everything had been done correctly. There are only two words to describe that assumption:

Completely wrong.

A week ago Friday, Gretchen got a call from someone at Brookstone who wanted to verify that I wanted a digital camera shipped to an address not on the credit card. They wouldn't tell me who had ordered it, but they would give me the last four digits of the card that had been used for the order. Those would be the last four digits of the closed account.

I called Discover. "Why," I asked, "are you continuing to allow charges to an account that you closed?"

"Oh, we didn't close that account."

"You sent me new cards with a new account number, told me that you were closing the old account, and that you would contact all of the people autobilling to the old account and give them the new correct information."

"Oops."

Three fraudulent charges that day. Two from a week earlier, one of which that the Discover rep couldn't actually find while looking at the list of charges on the old number and being told which were the valid charges. I found that when my statement came that evening.

I called them and was told I'd have to call back on Saturday. On Saturday, when I called back, I was told I would have to call back on Monday. I was also told the biggest pack of lies (we normally hold the card open for 45 days, so that must have been the problem -- until I pointed out that 45 days from April 4th would bring us to May 19th, nearly a month earlier than the fraudulent charges) that I have ever heard from a customer service rep. That seems to include her promise that they would mail me a statement of all of the charges posted to the old account number since the time it was supposed to be closed, as I still haven't received that.

I called back on Monday and added the other known fraudulent charge.

The autobilling changes? Not a one has actually occurred. And I've managed to fix all of them, save for I-Pass (which I'll call in a few minutes) and Sprint.

Which proceeded to distinguish itself by keeping me on the line for over half-an-hour to discover that they couldn't figure out how to make the change with their incompetently programmed systems. Apparently, I could do it on line if I could create a sign on, which I apparently can't, since I have turned off text messaging to this phone, which seems to be required in order to create a signon.

The last of the three incompetent people at Sprint who I spoke to said that she had set up my on-line account and that I'd receive an e-mail within 15 minutes.

That was two hours ago. Needless to say, I have received no e-mail.

I have sent an e-mail to Sprint Customer Service and received the usual "we will reply to you within 24 to 48 hours" message. I'm still waiting for a reply to the one that I sent them on Christmas Eve, so I'm not holding my breath.

Normally, I would cut tag something this long, but I'm just that annoyed with them.

Comments

[bigblued.livejournal.com]

Ran into the same problem with Sprint, lost my card, got a new one, wanted to change billing. Rep said could only be done online. I said I don't have internet. I was being difficult for the sake of being difficult. I asked if there was another way and pointed out that not everyone has internet and it would be stupid to insist that you do for basic billing transactions. She said she could mail me a form (7-10dys), I could fill it out and mail it back, and they could have it taken care of in a few weeks. I said that was crazy and asked if I could just go to a Sprint store to take care of it. She said no, it could only be done online. I asked for a manager, relayed the story, he said she was incorrect, they could handle it at a Sprint store, but he couldn't do anything for me over the phone.

I have great signal just about everywhere and every time I go into a Sprint store they bend over backwards to help. But their phone based customer service is awful.