Complexity of Discounts
After we went through our little fiasco with Verizon and switching to Sprint, I went into our company website at Comcast and submitted the request to have my employee discount applied to my Sprint account. I had originally given the information to the Sprint representative who sold us our phones, but I guess he never got it turned in.
Anyways, the website (and the representative) told me that it can take a few months for the discount to be active. After chatting with a friend of mine online, I decided to check my Sprint account online again (the online bills had been unavailable for a few weeks now). When I checked, I did indeed find that the discount was applied to my account… and that I had TWO monthly charges applied to this bill.
Needless to say, I immediately called customer support to find out what this charge was. That’s when I just groaned.
You see, when you request a discount to be applied to your account, Sprint does not apply it to your current account. Instead, it refunds the retroactive application of the discount, closes the account and then creates a new customer account containing the discount for the remainder of the customer’s contract.
I’m an application developer and I see the pluses of doing this (the programmers were lazy) and the minuses of doing this (the customer is kept completely confused and the customer service representatives have to deal with confused customers).
Okay, so that’s not a big deal. In this case, the second monthly charge was for the prior month during which this whole transition took place. Supposedly I was being credited the entire month on the old account (along with retroactive discounts) and then the month was charged to the new account with the charge for the upcoming month.
I can accept all this only because I know what’s going on. However, you might assume in all this that the credit amount would be moved to the new account.
No, it isn’t. They MAIL it.
Yup, they mail the credit and it can take 6-8 weeks to receive the credit in the mail. WHAT??!!?!??!?
Thankfully, I have to give credit to the customer representative who was dealing with said confused customer. She managed to move that credit over from the old account to the new one and it meant that I wasn’t paying the bill that was double the usual amount. In fact, it was less than the monthly amount due to the retroactive discount credit as well.
Overall, I’m happy with the final results. However, I am concerned for other customers who go through the same thing and find out much later when the check arrives in the mail (if they don’t notice the doubled-up bill first).
