me: Can you just put me straight through to escalations?
Sprint Customer Service: What are you calling about, sir?
me: My desire to speak to escalations.
Sprint Customer Service: What is the problem you’re having, sir?
me: Currently, the problem is that you won’t put me through to escalations. But since you’re being persistent, I’ll give you my story. (I tell her the whole story) So now, what I want is to go to my local Sprint store and get a new phone. Like now. I can’t wait another 4 days.
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I believe I can help you with that. Let me call your local store and the insurance company and I’ll get right back with you. Can you hold for 5 minutes?
me: Sure.
15 minutes later
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I have the insurance company on the other line and I believe I can get the phone to you in 1 or 2 days instead of 2 or 4.
me: That’s not what I asked for. I’d like to go to my local store and get a new phone now.
Sprint Customer Service: If you go to the store it will cost you to buy a new phone.
me: Obviously I don’t want to buy a new phone. I want mine replaced. If you can’t help me with that, then this conversation is pointless.
Sprint Customer Service: Well, that’s your choice, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you today?
me: Yes. You can put me through to a supervisor like I asked.
Sprint Customer Service: Okay sir. One moment and I’ll see if I can connect you with a supervisor at the insurance company.
me: No. I asked for escalations. I want a Sprint customer service supervisor. The insurance company is not going to be able to facilitate my going to the store and getting a new phone.
Sprint Customer Service: Oh, okay. I’ll put you through to a supervisor now. Can you hold for a moment?
me: Yes.
30 seconds later.
Recorded Voice: We’re sorry that we cannot take your call at this time. Please try your call again later. Thank you for calling Sprint.
*CLICK*
After staring, slack-jawed, at the phone for a moment, I pulled up a browser and went to The Consumerist. At that time, the post at the top of the page was entitled, “Poor Reception? ‘Go To The Hilltop’ Sprint Tells Customer“. So I emailed my post to the editor, Ben Popken. I haven’t heard back from him, but I’m sure he gets 500,000 similar emails daily.
That helped to arouse the gumption to try Sprint one more time. So I called the ostensibly “special” phone number that Sprint made available to Consumerist readers: 703-433-4401. It turns out that this is just the number for escalations. By this time it was after 5pm CST. I had been living the customer service dream for over two hours. The escalations people weren’t there after 5pm CST, so I called the main customer service number again. This time I demanded escalations immediately again:
me: I’d like to speak to escalations straightaway.
Sprint Customer Service: What are you calling about, sir?
me: (thinking I should have expected this – I tell her the whole story)
Sprint Customer Service: The phone that was sent to you, I think I can get it activated. Would you like me to try.
me: Well, if you think you can…
We try. It doesn’t work.
Sprint Customer Service: Let me ask the insurance company why they would send you a phone that was assigned to someone else. Can you hold for a moment.
me: Well. I’ve been down this path before and I was hung up on last time. Maybe you could just put me straight through to escalations?
Sprint Customer Service: Well how would you like this resolved.
I repeated my desire to get a new phone from the store like right freakin’ now.
Sprint Customer Service: That will cost you, sir.
me: I’m really starting to lose my cool here. I don’t want to yell at you, really I don’t. I thought I explained myself clearly. I want the store to replace this phone. I’ve been a customer for years. I want this to be made right.
Sprint Customer Service: (stammering) Well…I…uh. Sir, why don’t you just take the phone to your local store. They’ll take care of you.
me: But I’ve already been there. That’s how I ended up in all this mess.
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I think if you just take it to the store and tell them the problem, they’ll take care of you.
me:
me: Okay.
So I call my local store and ask for a manager. They don’t have one in the store, they’ve got a “manager-on-duty” – a sort of manager pro tempore. They make a reservation for me to see him at 7:15pm.
This is where this story finally gets good.
I get to the store and after about a 15 minute wait, I meet John P. Nesselhauf, Lead Consultant, Retail Management. This guy treats me like a human right from the start. He’s apologetic. I can tell he gets treated poorly all day and yet somehow still wants to help. I’m amazed. He calls “inside sales support” and gets the background on the phone I received from Asurion.
He explains that he has no idea how the insurance company came into possession of this phone, but it does in fact belong to someone else; someone who has a seasonal plan. He explains that it’s sometimes military who get seasonal plans, so this poor person could be in Iraq right now and when they come home they won’t have a phone. He’s at a loss as to how Asurion could have sent me the phone or even come into possession of it in the first place.
Meanwhile the “inside sales support” guy credits back my deductible. Yay. Then John offers to swap out my old damaged phone for a refurbished phone right on the spot. I was ready to cancel my service before I walked into the store and he saved it singlehandedly. He was authentically kind in spite of the fact that the customer before me was cursing at him. There is little in the way of operational realities at Sprint that I find at all worthy, but this one person managed to keep me as a customer. It’s amazing what a difference one person can make even in the face of an entire edifice of abject idiocy.
I’m calling John’s boss tomorrow and demanding that John get a raise or a promotion or something.

I have the HTC touch. Over the weekend, it received some water damage and is completely inoperable. “No problem,” I thought. “I have insurance!” So I went to the Sprint store near my house, where I’ve always gone when my phone was damaged, to get a replacement. I was told I’d have to call the insurance company, have the replacement phone sent to me and pay a $50 deductible. I have discovered since then, that under the terms of my contract, had I, say, dropped the phone in a lake and then filed a police report, I would have simply gotten a new phone sans deductible. Word to the wise.
I spoke to a Sprint customer service representative on the phone before calling the insurance company and when I explained that I came to understand this odd discrepency about losing the phone and filing a police report, I received a condescending lecture about the machinations of insurance. Gee, thanks. After accepting that I would be without a phone for a couple days (they made no offer to provide a temporary replacement) I made the call to the insurance company, Asurion. After navigating their rather terrible phone menu software for a bit, I gave up and went to their website and filed the claim. It turns out that to get my phone quickly, I had to pay an additional $7. Nevermind that I’ve payed for the cost of 5 of these phones in insurance premiums over the last 5 years. Not a big deal. Insurance is what it is. At least I’d be getting a new phone.
So the phone comes today at around 3pm central time. I unwrap it and go through the process of activating it only to be unceremoniously shunted from the Sprint automated activation system over to customer service. The customer service representative asks for all the information I’ve already given to the activation system. They he asks me what I need today. I tell him I’m trying to activate my replacement phone, doesn’t he already know that? He seems confused and stammers for a moment and then asks me for the serial number from the inside of the phone. So I have to hang up with him, have him call me back on another phone, take the battery out of the replacement phone and give him the serial number. Midway through giving him this, he sighs and tells me in a frustrated tone that no, he doesn’t need the serial number, he needs the DEC ESN number. So I give him this. He then tells me to put the battery back in so we can activate. So I do.
At this point, he sits there silently for a few minutes. I’m waiting for the phone to boot. Finally I say, “hello?” Then we have this exchange:
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I need you to give me that serial number again.
me: You mean the DEC ESN number?
Sprint Customer Serivce: Yes.
me: The phone is rebooting. You want me to pull the battery again?
Sprint Customer Service: Yes.
me: Okay. The number is _________.
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service:
me: Hello?
Sprint Customer Service: Uh, sir, we can’t activate that phone. Where did you get it? Did you buy it?
me: (wondering if he’s insinuating that I stole it) It’s a replacement. I got it from the insurance company. Remember?
Sprint Customer Service: Oh yes. Well it’s assigned to someone else. I can’t activate it. Where did you get it?
me: I just told you. I’m reading you the number right from the back of the phone.
Sprint Customer Service: Well then what’s the HEX ESN number?
me: (reads number)
Sprint Customer Service: Yes, that phone is assigned to someone else.
me: How can it be? I’m holding it in my hand. Whomever it is assigned to is probably fairly non-plussed about not having their phone.
Sprint Customer Service: I don’t know, sir. You’ll have to call the insurance company to get a new phone.
me: So I’m out a phone for another couple days?
Sprint Customer Service: Yes, sir.
me: I use this phone for my business, is there anything you can do for me? A temp phone or something?
Sprint Customer Service: Do you have another phone you could use on the Sprint network that I could activate temporarily.
me: No.
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service: Well. I can credit you a couple days on your account.
me: (giving up at this point) Okay. Thanks.
Sprint Customer Service: Alright sir. I’ll credit your account. Thank you for calling Sprint and have a great day.
me: Awesome.
I don’t even know what a “couple days” of credit on my account means. I pay a flat rate for unlimited minutes. So how does that even translate. I’m sure the representative had no idea either.
Now I’ve got two phones that don’t work that I’ll have to send back or they’ll charge me up to something like $200 each. I’m still without a working phone. What’s to guarantee that the next phone won’t also resist activation? If there’s another cellphone carrier out there that would like to pay my fee to get out of my Sprint contract, I’ll happily switch.

As I interpret this footage, Mr. Jones appears to be pissing on the whole customer generated marketing/social networking/web 2.0 clique. It’s not exactly what I would call withering, but as I interpret it, there are some substantive arguments offered. For those too lazy to read John’s post, here are the relevant bits from David’s speech to which John calls attention and my brief thoughts.

“Our industry cannot delegate the creation of brilliant ideas to consumers. That has to be our job.”

In general, I concur. However, there is always Ben’s 1%.

“What’s been quite a prevalent trend in the lazy agencies over the last two years is to go, ‘I know. Consumers can now create ideas so what we’ll do is get them to come up with the idea.’”

This is undoubtedly true, but I suggest that it derives from the fact that marketing firms are constituted for a kind of communication that is defined by the mass communication technologies of the last hundred and fifty years. Ubiquitous packet-switched networks with decent bandwidth to our homes can only encourage demand for conversation. Marketers are tooled to talk at a mass audience. This conversation stuff is new to marketers and because it seems to require something of an operational and cultural retooling, I imagine it will have to be forced on them by the market. They may try to include these initiatives in their campaigns, but until they make this constitutional shift, they will be hard pressed to create authentic conversations.

“If you look at and go play around on the ‘YouTubes’ and ‘MySpaces’ … well, there are a few entertaining things there but there is so much utter crap there. There are only so many times you can watch someone dance in a crazy way or mime badly to a song. And so firstly, consumers aren’t that brilliant at it and secondly, what they will do is not all that relevant.”

This would seem to be the other horn of Ben’s 1% rule. To wit: if 1% of your audience will contribute something profound and relevant, it follows that the other 99% will not. It does not follow, I submit, that the conversation is thus rendered useless, for reasons I’ve mentioned previously, but it does seem to suggest that so-called CGM is likely not any kind of panacea. It is a prediction of what I have the pretention of calling my model of what is going on with marketing that the “traditional marketers” and their tools really won’t go away, but they will have to learn what the new technology really means and that discovery will necessitate a fundamental change in the constitution and creative culture of the marketing firm.
Incidentally, the depths of my loathing for the name, “Integral Marketing” grows daily. How about: Humanization? Anthropic Communication? Yuck. Tribal Marketing? Nope. Really, help me out here.