[RANT] Sprint PCS... ever heard of BizTalk, MTS, etc.?
Has Sprint never heard of BizTalk and the concept of transactional processing? Obviously, whatever system they have in place is seriously flawed. I don’t know what they are using, but a simple phone transfer should not take in excess of 5 days to complete. Even more so, it shouldn’t be in a situation where every time I call, they have to re-research what the problem is, tell me they understand my pain and then tell me that it will be some such amount of time before it’s completed.
It’s even more difficult for someone that knows about the technologies that are available, how these technologies work, the problems in which they are designed to solve and how to make them work together. When you’re in this situation, you can’t help but keep telling yourself… why don’t these guys hire you to come in and fix the problems?
I can’t blame any one person on this problem… it’s not the developers fault; since they report to the their managers. Those managers in turn report to probably some additional managers; and those managers report to even someone higher up the chain. Once your at the top of the reporting chain inside of the IT department, those people have to report to the Cxx level people who in turn have to report to the board of directors. The board of directors in turn have to report to the share holders. The share holders have only one interest in mind… how much is my stock worth. They don’t care if the end user is actually happy with the services provided by Sprint PCS, only that those end users are actually handing over cash. Shareholders are concerned about profit… not customer relations and extending features to the end user. The only time these become a factor is when a competitor causes their profits to take a hit… and considering that Sprint PCS has such as strong brand name, they can probably afford to wait to spend money on improving their systems and features.
When I spoke with the initial sales person, what was the point of having to actually sell me anything? If I didn’t buy anything, 10 other people would walk in and buy something anyway. Wireless phones are one of the largest growing pieces of technology there is today… even schools are allowing children to carry phones!
So, back to the problem… however these systems are integrated (or not) is the root of the problem here. What seems to be happening is some sort of request is being entered into the system. That request is failing at some point… and apparently getting lost. It’s taking me, the end user, to call in at the designated time told to me in order to raise the red flag for something to be looked at. From a customer service point of view, this is the worst thing that can happen. We developers spend a lot of time trying to protect against this very same thing happening. The last person we want to hear from because of some error message is the end user.
Now I’m being told that it will be June 1st by the end of business (8:00pm Eastern). Anyone want to start taking some bets on whether I’ll be calling them at around 8:01pm Eastern because the phone is still not working (their customer service number is 24/7)?
At this point, they’ve now offered me two months free service… wow!… that’s great. In the end, it doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if the phone isn’t working!
Some of you may be asking… why don’t you just transfer to some other provider? That’s a very good question; one in which I’ve already attempted to do just to find out that their service doesn’t work at my house :-(
BTW, have to give AT&T Wireless a big thumbs up… apparently their systems work as designed. To bad their signal doesn’t reach my house :-(