My wife and I have been using Cricket for a number of years and I don’t have a single complaint. The service has been great. The purpose of this post is more of an observation than anything though. My parents were with Tmobile and interested in switching to Cricket as Tmobile coverage is a joke. My dad called me up, said he spoke to the representative from Cricket and that I could get some kind of referral credit. I thought it sounded good so I met my parents at the Cricket store. I mentioned the credit to the employee working and she asked me to enter my pin number. What neither myself or my parents realized is that she was adding them to the account I share with my wife, which is not what we wanted. I helped my parents choose a couple phones and the store employee got them set up.
Next day, I’m at work and suddenly my phone has no service. I’m thinking “oh boy, they must have messed something up.” I went to the Cricket store to find out what was going on. It couldn’t have been a lack of payment because my wife and I are on auto pay and that was processed the day before I met my parents at the store. I went to the Cricket store to try to figure out what was going on. This time someone else was working there and I believe he was the manager. He tried to figure out what was going on with the account. The shutoff had to do with a lack of credit, but once I showed him the “autopay processed” text message from Cricket I received just 2 days prior he knew that we had paid our bill. He looked further into it and then realized my parents were added to our account rather than getting their own account. At any rate, he made a number of phone calls and was getting nowhere with it. He was eventually able to remove my parents from our account and create one for them. However because the system thought we had not paid our bill (even though we had proof of it), the phones on our account were still shut off. I’m not exactly sure why the system did that due to adding two new phones to the line by mistake. The manager was not sure how to get the phones back on without a payment being submitted. I asked if there was some kind of 3rd level tech support to call within the company and he said no. Eventually he ended up paying it out of his own account. That was certainly kind of him and he definitely didn’t need to do that. But still, I’m just wondering, was this a lack of training or is the system really so automated that it is very hard for them to solve unique kinds of situations?
