Cricket WIreless: A Niche Play To Serve Only The Underserved?
06/01/12 08:25 Filed in: PrePaid services
I like the idea of prepaid wireless service and companies like Cricket Wireless. They are a facilities based operator covering markets across the country ranging in size from Houston or Chicago down to Macon and Columbus, Georgia. Their investments in infrastructure make them vested in their markets and communities in a way that a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) simply won’t be. Finally they bring simplified, no contract, and high-value hardware and service options to their customers. This is exactly what attracted me to originally purchase a Huawei Ascend II from Cricket in August and just this week the Huawei Mercury. In a perfect world this article should be a product and service review but that will have to come later.
The physical or virtual shelves of any bookstore will have row on row of business books extolling the value of employees and how they can make or break a company. While this is true any business manager also must decide what level of investment they want to make in their customer service people for what return based on their overall business model. Companies like Nordstrom strive to create lifelong customers through superior customer service and products while others do not. Conventional wisdom holds that companies with premium products and services will offer higher levels of customer service than comparable budget offerings because they can afford to and their customers demand it. In most cases it is true except for many upscale Los Angeles restaurants who I personally think revel in providing horrendous service. There are exceptions to the rule; notable companies like Southwest Airlines or Target who often go above and beyond for their customers. Further down the scale than these companies are the legions of average and abysmal customer service practitioners with the wireless industry generally trailing or in the middle of the pack.
Based on Cricket’s low cost, flat rate, and no contract model conventional wisdom would say that they would not offer very good customer service. In fact until the financial crisis of 2007 and the ascendency of Android in 2011 “prepaid" carriers like Cricket served the underserved and unserved potential wireless customers of society. The argument goes something like where else would this flotsam go for their wireless needs? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint? Certainly not as they are sub-prime or worse, won’t or can’t pay a service deposit, and don’t want a two year contract. Long time industry followers will remember Wall Street’s wrath when the financials of Sprint’s Account Spending Limit (ASL) zero deposit program eventually came to light and churn skyrocketed. These customers have no choice but to purchase from Cricket or go to Wal-Mart for substandard Tracfones.
Reality couldn’t be further from the truth with competing no-contract, flat rate service, and hardware options available from regional companies like ClearTalk to national options including MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Simple Mobile, H2O Wireless, and Straight Talk. In the case of Virgin and Boost Mobile they are subsidiaries of Sprint Nextel and examples of the growing top tier’s interest in the value segment of the market. Ignoring or providing poor customer service is a perilous endeavor in a market with ample alternative options for customers who are free to switch with nothing but a 30 day payment to keep them from exploring other options.
My first experience with Cricket started in San Diego, CA in a corporate owned store located at Southcrest Park Plaza (1490 S 43RD ST STE D-E, 92113). I wanted to experiment with the new Huawei Ascend II which was one of the first non-contract Android phones to run Android 2.3. The store, like all Crickets stores I have since visited, had a long waiting line of customers who wanted to pay their bills or have their phone serviced but were not actually activating new service. A request to activate new service invariably bumps one close to the front of the line.
Cricket - Southcrest Park Plaza - San Diego, CA
The store was merchandised well and while I waited I learned that Cricket had affordable roaming rates in Mexico which I would not have guessed. I was soon helped by a gentleman (CSR# 9999 - assuming thats a customer service representative ID) who agreed to match the MyCricket.com price and activate new service for me. I requested a 512 Austin area code and he told me they could only assign local San Diego NPA-NXX combinations. To switch to an Austin, TX number I would have to cancel and activate new service in Austin at a later date. In retrospect this foreshadowed all the challenges that would come four months later with my attempt at using Google Voice with Cricket in Austin.
In the meantime because the Google Voice number was a San Diego NPA-NXX as was the Cricket phone the conditional call forwarding and the service worked flawlessly. Overall the experience with Cricket was positive even though the stores remind me of the local Cable TV offices with people lined up waiting to pay their bills and and argue about why their account is suspended or something similar. There are benefits to online bill pay for those who can and do use it. At a later date I notice on the billing it appeared that the representative had added insurance ($5) to the account that I’m sure I wouldn’t have approved and was the only blemish on the experience.
Cricket - Century South - Austin, TX
The Cricket service from San Diego lapsed in December when I conducted an experiment with an AT&T iPhone 4S. The results proved that using AT&T as my primary voice service far exceeded the cost of the Cricket $55 unlimited smartphone plan (Sprint CDMA doesn’t work in my location and T-Mobile is hit or miss). The goal of the visit to the Century South, 801 East William Cannon Drive, store was to procure the recently launched 1.4 GHz Huawei Mercury Android 2.3 phone and new Cricket service. Based on the experience in San Diego this should have been a simple trip. The store was packed with people waiting to restore service, have their phones fixed, or make payments on their account as usual. Expressing the desire to activate new service, like in San Diego, bumped me close to the front of the line. This is where the parallel with the San Diego store visit diverged.
Based on the San Diego experience I expected the store to match the MyCricket.com Huawei Mercury price of $229.99, a $20 savings. I was directed to Jessica who would assist me with my new service. Jessica is one of those customer service people that detracts from the brand and either needs a non-customer facing role or should be let go. When I approached her station, at her behest, she continued to type on hey keyboard and stare at her monitor. Even when she asked if she could assist me she made no eye contact and kept typing. Without looking up Jessica said this simply wasn’t possible because it was a new phone. The Huawei Ascend II had been new too at the time and it was no problem in San Diego. Jessica continued to type and did not engage me directly. A request for the manager first prompted Jessica to tell me to have a seat and I could wait. When I declined the offer to sit another woman, Geni, came over and informed me, while Jessica continued to stare at her computer, that if indeed a Cricket store had matched an online price it was a convenience favor and they had no intention of doing so at this location. The store staff’s education and knowledge far outweighed the online price disparity according to Geni. The problem with this assertion is that it can only be validated through actual performance of the store employees and isn’t a preordained fact. Jessica and Geni’s actions were doing more to degrade any desire I still had left to purchase Cricket service than to entice me to buy from their alleged product knowledge prowess and so I made one last furtive attempt to talk to the manager. Mark, the manager, never did appear so I opted for a tactical retreat and left the store.
MyCricket.com and Customer Service
Purchasing online was simple and Cricket’s contractor, Brightpoint, shipped the new Huawei Mercury overnight with FedEx service. Simply dialing *228 completes the programming of the phone and the updating of the PRL (preferred roaming list) and the entire process takes only a couple of minutes and the service is active. It would prove prescient that I saved the shipping box and packaging materials.
Once I determined, see previous post on Google Voice, that I needed a 619 number instead of an Austin 512 I decided to call customer care and make the necessary changes. What should have been a simple process became a phone call that lasted over 75 minutes, included two different call center groups and over six different transfers. In retrospect I’m surprised that Cricket didn’t disconnect me on any of the transfers as is want to happen with Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile in my experience.
Customer care directed me to technical support who concluded that a new area code could indeed be assigned but first the cancellation department needed to terminate the existing 512 number. A transfer to the cancellation department resulted in the successful cancellation of the current 512 number. This department then transferred me back to technical support to complete the provisioning of the new 619 number. Unfortunately the new technical service representative said they could not activate a new number without a new payment of $55 and the loss of the existing $55 payment that had only a single day of service used on it. The suggestion and subsequent action was to transfer back to the cancellation department where they could recover the existing $55 payment and provision the new 619 number.
On the second go around at the cancellation department the process started to go off the proverbial tracks. The representative insisted at first that it wasn’t possible to activate a 619 area code since none were available in the Austin area. Once provided with a San Diego, CA street address to locate the correct market things did not improve. The representative could only seem to find the Reno, NV market and then proceeded to insist that Reno included San Diego. The address I provided was in the 92101 zip code which made no sense on why they couldn’t find San Diego (Cricket is headquartered in San Diego, CA). When asked if the representative realized that Reno is over 500 miles away from San Diego they proceeded to tell me that it was the same market. It was also about this time that I discovered that this call center was in the Philippines. The final straw with this representative was the insistence that even with a California area code, assuming they could find one, it would not be possible to program the phone while I was physically in Texas. I asked to speak to a manager.
Sasha (employee ID# 112465) came onto the line and proceeded to support the notion that the Reno, NV market was the same as the San Diego, CA market and that this was how Cricket defined markets. Sasha also validated that it was not possible to program the phone while in Texas with a 619 San Diego number if indeed these actually existed. While this could be technically true with the *228 code and with certain network configurations it made no sense with what I knew of Cricket’s network. For example if Austin was an affiliate market for Cricket without any network to network integration then it would make sense for the provisioning to not work but this was not the case. Certain brands like ClearTalk are just umbrella brands for marketing purposes that cover multiple independent operators to create the illusion of a larger entity and so it would make sense if I was dealing with ClearTalk. Think CellularOne during its prime in the 90s. Either way manually programming the phone would work as a last resort.
Sasha capitulated and agreed to finally provision a 619 number, she eventually found it, but insisted that the programming would not be successful. She stated that Cricket recorded these conversation and that the new number provisioning would be at my own risk. Sasha also insisted that if the provisioning did not work, and based on the recordings, I would not be eligible for a refund of the original $55 payment for service for the 512 number or the subsequent $55 payment to activate the 619 number. Somewhere around this point I was thinking that I should sell my Cricket stock, save my $110, and simply return the entire package and unwind this boondoggle. Once Sasha quit speaking and I was able to request a transfer to the returns department I did seriously consider selling the stock.
On the fifth successful call transfer I was connected to the returns department, also in the Philippines, where Edward proceeded to assist me. Edward informed me that policy was to only refund the phone price and not the service fees regardless of the situation. There would be no RMA or reference number and the phone simply had to be shipped to the returns address listed on the Cricket site. This seemed like a customer service disaster waiting to happen. In roughly 30 days, at Cricket’s discretion, a refund check would be issued, even though I paid with a credit card, if the phone was in a like new condition. I requested a manager even though Edward insisted that he was correct and no other alternative was possible.
Next on the line was Edward’s supervisor, Alex (Employee ID# 91749). Alex was very congenial and the antithesis of Edward or Sasha. She was empathetic and promised to note my account as eligible for a service refund since there had been less than a day of service. Even though Alex had no remedy for the situation she had a far superior sense of how to handle customer service than any of the previous advocates.
The Huawei Mercury was boxed and shipped USPS back to Cricket. It was convenient that I kept all the original shipping packaging. The thought still nagged at me that none of these people could be correct. It had to be possible to provision a phone outside of its home market as long as it was on a native Cricket network. If not how would Cricket deal with customers who were traveling and had damaged or stolen phones and needed a replacement? Secondly unless Cricket really was running multiple billing and provisioning platforms on a regional basis out of market numbers should be available.
Cricket - Norwood Plaza - Austin, TX
To put this matter to rest of out of market provisioning and NPA-NXX activation I decided to make one more trip to the North Austin Cricket store at 1030 Norwood Park Boulevard. The greeter at the door repeated the same message that these requests were simply not possible. During this brief discussion the store manager, Jim, overheard the conversation and indicated that it may be possible if I had a local San Diego address that they could enter into the market/NPA-NXX lookup tool and obtain a 619 number for me. Once again I ended up in the expedited new service queue ahead of the throngs of people waiting for phone service or to pay their bills. On a side note there are automatic teller machines in the stores to process payments but nobody ever seems to use them. That is another mystery for another time.
When I was called to the counter the representative, Juliana, parroted the same line that it was simply not possible. To her credit when I mentioned that Jim had said it may work she double checked and grabbed a Huawei Mercury to try it anyway. After several minutes Juliana had activated a 619 area code and provisioned the Huawei Mercury for me. A quick test call confirmed that the *74 conditional forwarding service to my Google Voice number was successful and the original mission that started on a monday was completed five days later on a friday. Success!
The questions remains what in Cricket’s culture or training created such resistance or ineptness in handling this simple request? Cricket serves many markets and with their MVNO relationship with Sprint has a legitimate claim as a nationwide provider. They will be faced with these types of requests again and again as they seek to grow their subscriber base with more advanced phones like the Huawei Mercury. Until Cricket finds and trains more employees like Jim and Juliana they will be stuck in a niche play serving the under and unserved, no credit, and cash market portion of the population that can’t or won’t go to the larger brands like United States Cellular, MetroPCS, AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Jim’s awareness of the activity in his store and Juliana’s willingness try something outside of her normal experience saved a customer and restored for now my faith in the no-contract facilities based carrier alternative to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile that Cricket Wireless represents.
The physical or virtual shelves of any bookstore will have row on row of business books extolling the value of employees and how they can make or break a company. While this is true any business manager also must decide what level of investment they want to make in their customer service people for what return based on their overall business model. Companies like Nordstrom strive to create lifelong customers through superior customer service and products while others do not. Conventional wisdom holds that companies with premium products and services will offer higher levels of customer service than comparable budget offerings because they can afford to and their customers demand it. In most cases it is true except for many upscale Los Angeles restaurants who I personally think revel in providing horrendous service. There are exceptions to the rule; notable companies like Southwest Airlines or Target who often go above and beyond for their customers. Further down the scale than these companies are the legions of average and abysmal customer service practitioners with the wireless industry generally trailing or in the middle of the pack.
Based on Cricket’s low cost, flat rate, and no contract model conventional wisdom would say that they would not offer very good customer service. In fact until the financial crisis of 2007 and the ascendency of Android in 2011 “prepaid" carriers like Cricket served the underserved and unserved potential wireless customers of society. The argument goes something like where else would this flotsam go for their wireless needs? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint? Certainly not as they are sub-prime or worse, won’t or can’t pay a service deposit, and don’t want a two year contract. Long time industry followers will remember Wall Street’s wrath when the financials of Sprint’s Account Spending Limit (ASL) zero deposit program eventually came to light and churn skyrocketed. These customers have no choice but to purchase from Cricket or go to Wal-Mart for substandard Tracfones.
Reality couldn’t be further from the truth with competing no-contract, flat rate service, and hardware options available from regional companies like ClearTalk to national options including MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Simple Mobile, H2O Wireless, and Straight Talk. In the case of Virgin and Boost Mobile they are subsidiaries of Sprint Nextel and examples of the growing top tier’s interest in the value segment of the market. Ignoring or providing poor customer service is a perilous endeavor in a market with ample alternative options for customers who are free to switch with nothing but a 30 day payment to keep them from exploring other options.
My first experience with Cricket started in San Diego, CA in a corporate owned store located at Southcrest Park Plaza (1490 S 43RD ST STE D-E, 92113). I wanted to experiment with the new Huawei Ascend II which was one of the first non-contract Android phones to run Android 2.3. The store, like all Crickets stores I have since visited, had a long waiting line of customers who wanted to pay their bills or have their phone serviced but were not actually activating new service. A request to activate new service invariably bumps one close to the front of the line.
Cricket - Southcrest Park Plaza - San Diego, CA
The store was merchandised well and while I waited I learned that Cricket had affordable roaming rates in Mexico which I would not have guessed. I was soon helped by a gentleman (CSR# 9999 - assuming thats a customer service representative ID) who agreed to match the MyCricket.com price and activate new service for me. I requested a 512 Austin area code and he told me they could only assign local San Diego NPA-NXX combinations. To switch to an Austin, TX number I would have to cancel and activate new service in Austin at a later date. In retrospect this foreshadowed all the challenges that would come four months later with my attempt at using Google Voice with Cricket in Austin.
In the meantime because the Google Voice number was a San Diego NPA-NXX as was the Cricket phone the conditional call forwarding and the service worked flawlessly. Overall the experience with Cricket was positive even though the stores remind me of the local Cable TV offices with people lined up waiting to pay their bills and and argue about why their account is suspended or something similar. There are benefits to online bill pay for those who can and do use it. At a later date I notice on the billing it appeared that the representative had added insurance ($5) to the account that I’m sure I wouldn’t have approved and was the only blemish on the experience.
Cricket - Century South - Austin, TX
The Cricket service from San Diego lapsed in December when I conducted an experiment with an AT&T iPhone 4S. The results proved that using AT&T as my primary voice service far exceeded the cost of the Cricket $55 unlimited smartphone plan (Sprint CDMA doesn’t work in my location and T-Mobile is hit or miss). The goal of the visit to the Century South, 801 East William Cannon Drive, store was to procure the recently launched 1.4 GHz Huawei Mercury Android 2.3 phone and new Cricket service. Based on the experience in San Diego this should have been a simple trip. The store was packed with people waiting to restore service, have their phones fixed, or make payments on their account as usual. Expressing the desire to activate new service, like in San Diego, bumped me close to the front of the line. This is where the parallel with the San Diego store visit diverged.
Based on the San Diego experience I expected the store to match the MyCricket.com Huawei Mercury price of $229.99, a $20 savings. I was directed to Jessica who would assist me with my new service. Jessica is one of those customer service people that detracts from the brand and either needs a non-customer facing role or should be let go. When I approached her station, at her behest, she continued to type on hey keyboard and stare at her monitor. Even when she asked if she could assist me she made no eye contact and kept typing. Without looking up Jessica said this simply wasn’t possible because it was a new phone. The Huawei Ascend II had been new too at the time and it was no problem in San Diego. Jessica continued to type and did not engage me directly. A request for the manager first prompted Jessica to tell me to have a seat and I could wait. When I declined the offer to sit another woman, Geni, came over and informed me, while Jessica continued to stare at her computer, that if indeed a Cricket store had matched an online price it was a convenience favor and they had no intention of doing so at this location. The store staff’s education and knowledge far outweighed the online price disparity according to Geni. The problem with this assertion is that it can only be validated through actual performance of the store employees and isn’t a preordained fact. Jessica and Geni’s actions were doing more to degrade any desire I still had left to purchase Cricket service than to entice me to buy from their alleged product knowledge prowess and so I made one last furtive attempt to talk to the manager. Mark, the manager, never did appear so I opted for a tactical retreat and left the store.
MyCricket.com and Customer Service
Purchasing online was simple and Cricket’s contractor, Brightpoint, shipped the new Huawei Mercury overnight with FedEx service. Simply dialing *228 completes the programming of the phone and the updating of the PRL (preferred roaming list) and the entire process takes only a couple of minutes and the service is active. It would prove prescient that I saved the shipping box and packaging materials.
Once I determined, see previous post on Google Voice, that I needed a 619 number instead of an Austin 512 I decided to call customer care and make the necessary changes. What should have been a simple process became a phone call that lasted over 75 minutes, included two different call center groups and over six different transfers. In retrospect I’m surprised that Cricket didn’t disconnect me on any of the transfers as is want to happen with Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile in my experience.
Customer care directed me to technical support who concluded that a new area code could indeed be assigned but first the cancellation department needed to terminate the existing 512 number. A transfer to the cancellation department resulted in the successful cancellation of the current 512 number. This department then transferred me back to technical support to complete the provisioning of the new 619 number. Unfortunately the new technical service representative said they could not activate a new number without a new payment of $55 and the loss of the existing $55 payment that had only a single day of service used on it. The suggestion and subsequent action was to transfer back to the cancellation department where they could recover the existing $55 payment and provision the new 619 number.
On the second go around at the cancellation department the process started to go off the proverbial tracks. The representative insisted at first that it wasn’t possible to activate a 619 area code since none were available in the Austin area. Once provided with a San Diego, CA street address to locate the correct market things did not improve. The representative could only seem to find the Reno, NV market and then proceeded to insist that Reno included San Diego. The address I provided was in the 92101 zip code which made no sense on why they couldn’t find San Diego (Cricket is headquartered in San Diego, CA). When asked if the representative realized that Reno is over 500 miles away from San Diego they proceeded to tell me that it was the same market. It was also about this time that I discovered that this call center was in the Philippines. The final straw with this representative was the insistence that even with a California area code, assuming they could find one, it would not be possible to program the phone while I was physically in Texas. I asked to speak to a manager.
Sasha (employee ID# 112465) came onto the line and proceeded to support the notion that the Reno, NV market was the same as the San Diego, CA market and that this was how Cricket defined markets. Sasha also validated that it was not possible to program the phone while in Texas with a 619 San Diego number if indeed these actually existed. While this could be technically true with the *228 code and with certain network configurations it made no sense with what I knew of Cricket’s network. For example if Austin was an affiliate market for Cricket without any network to network integration then it would make sense for the provisioning to not work but this was not the case. Certain brands like ClearTalk are just umbrella brands for marketing purposes that cover multiple independent operators to create the illusion of a larger entity and so it would make sense if I was dealing with ClearTalk. Think CellularOne during its prime in the 90s. Either way manually programming the phone would work as a last resort.
Sasha capitulated and agreed to finally provision a 619 number, she eventually found it, but insisted that the programming would not be successful. She stated that Cricket recorded these conversation and that the new number provisioning would be at my own risk. Sasha also insisted that if the provisioning did not work, and based on the recordings, I would not be eligible for a refund of the original $55 payment for service for the 512 number or the subsequent $55 payment to activate the 619 number. Somewhere around this point I was thinking that I should sell my Cricket stock, save my $110, and simply return the entire package and unwind this boondoggle. Once Sasha quit speaking and I was able to request a transfer to the returns department I did seriously consider selling the stock.
On the fifth successful call transfer I was connected to the returns department, also in the Philippines, where Edward proceeded to assist me. Edward informed me that policy was to only refund the phone price and not the service fees regardless of the situation. There would be no RMA or reference number and the phone simply had to be shipped to the returns address listed on the Cricket site. This seemed like a customer service disaster waiting to happen. In roughly 30 days, at Cricket’s discretion, a refund check would be issued, even though I paid with a credit card, if the phone was in a like new condition. I requested a manager even though Edward insisted that he was correct and no other alternative was possible.
Next on the line was Edward’s supervisor, Alex (Employee ID# 91749). Alex was very congenial and the antithesis of Edward or Sasha. She was empathetic and promised to note my account as eligible for a service refund since there had been less than a day of service. Even though Alex had no remedy for the situation she had a far superior sense of how to handle customer service than any of the previous advocates.
The Huawei Mercury was boxed and shipped USPS back to Cricket. It was convenient that I kept all the original shipping packaging. The thought still nagged at me that none of these people could be correct. It had to be possible to provision a phone outside of its home market as long as it was on a native Cricket network. If not how would Cricket deal with customers who were traveling and had damaged or stolen phones and needed a replacement? Secondly unless Cricket really was running multiple billing and provisioning platforms on a regional basis out of market numbers should be available.
Cricket - Norwood Plaza - Austin, TX
To put this matter to rest of out of market provisioning and NPA-NXX activation I decided to make one more trip to the North Austin Cricket store at 1030 Norwood Park Boulevard. The greeter at the door repeated the same message that these requests were simply not possible. During this brief discussion the store manager, Jim, overheard the conversation and indicated that it may be possible if I had a local San Diego address that they could enter into the market/NPA-NXX lookup tool and obtain a 619 number for me. Once again I ended up in the expedited new service queue ahead of the throngs of people waiting for phone service or to pay their bills. On a side note there are automatic teller machines in the stores to process payments but nobody ever seems to use them. That is another mystery for another time.
When I was called to the counter the representative, Juliana, parroted the same line that it was simply not possible. To her credit when I mentioned that Jim had said it may work she double checked and grabbed a Huawei Mercury to try it anyway. After several minutes Juliana had activated a 619 area code and provisioned the Huawei Mercury for me. A quick test call confirmed that the *74 conditional forwarding service to my Google Voice number was successful and the original mission that started on a monday was completed five days later on a friday. Success!
The questions remains what in Cricket’s culture or training created such resistance or ineptness in handling this simple request? Cricket serves many markets and with their MVNO relationship with Sprint has a legitimate claim as a nationwide provider. They will be faced with these types of requests again and again as they seek to grow their subscriber base with more advanced phones like the Huawei Mercury. Until Cricket finds and trains more employees like Jim and Juliana they will be stuck in a niche play serving the under and unserved, no credit, and cash market portion of the population that can’t or won’t go to the larger brands like United States Cellular, MetroPCS, AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Jim’s awareness of the activity in his store and Juliana’s willingness try something outside of her normal experience saved a customer and restored for now my faith in the no-contract facilities based carrier alternative to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile that Cricket Wireless represents.
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