what do you expect from a prepaid service

you get what you pay for

Cellular phone companies are notorious for customer service problems. The brutal truth is that it is very expensive to deliver high-quality customer service and few customers are willing to pay what it cost. I am sure that many customers have had a bad customer experience with every wireless service provider in the business; however, Boost Mobile is above average.

Perhaps there were some problems with the initial launch of Boost's Unlimited Service, but that's not unusual for any company with a new service. Notice that there has been no complaints in a very long time.

Most recently Boost Mobile was chosen as "Among the best" in prepaid customer satisfaction. Boost Mobile was only 3 points (out of 1000 points) from the top rated firm in the study. Key competitors MetroPCS and Cricket rated at the bottom of this independent survey: http://www.jdpower.com/Telecom/ratings/prepaid-wireless-ratings

To that Boost employee who filed a rebuttal . . . you can speak for yourself, try to be on the other end of the line calling into your Boost hotline and see for yourself how frustrating it is to get help from you guys. Don't make excuses for the company, these situations should have been in the pipeline since the feasibility study stages of your company. Now you get it? You have been obviously brainwashed by your training in that company you sound so idiotic. The kind of people you hire are unbelievably incompetent that we don't mind spending this time ranting about your lousy customer service. Don't make lengthy excuses. Try to be the consumer and see for yourself!

I remember when I was first hired to take calls for Boost Mobile. Our queue was usually clear, we had a tech support team that would actually take calls, and we had a troubleshooting resource in which we could look up the exact complaint and have the exact steps required to take care of it.

It was not long afterward that I first heard of Unlimited by Boost, and people at my call center began getting "CDMA training." At this time, they had three calling areas, North and South California and Texas. Their wait between calls stretched for half an hour on busy days even though activations took about twenty minutes since the process was new and no one had really done it before. Now that we have 19 HCAs and are expecting to expand even more in the next month or two, our entire call center has been converted to CDMA, but our queue regularly has 400 people on hold. We have four call centers with about three hundred or so people each trying to deal with thousands of people, and even though we have personally written reports to Boost that we need more call centers to handle this, they don't expect to begin hiring more people for months, now, after the next expansion.

Our troubleshooting steps are now non-existent, as well. We have one major reference if anything happens with your phone: the so-called "Watson's Troubleshooting List." We have to make sure your programming is correct, make sure you have the right phone, make sure you have the right price plan for the service that might not be working, check that you have additional money on your prepaid balance to cover extras that you may be trying to use, and make sure you're not on the phone. That's about it. Tech has a few more options that most of us are aware of, but we could technically be fired for using them ourselves (like the software and network updates).

Of course, as of now, we are not allowed to wait on hold more than 30 seconds for tech, even though their hold times are about thirty minutes. Otherwise we have to make a case, of which there are also so many that it no longer takes only 24 hours to get through them, it takes more like three days to a week, and the case workers have gotten so desperate to get through them they start closing cases for all sorts of ridiculous reasons like "had no contact number" or "did not state how long problem has been going on." Let's not forget that, unlike before, customers cannot talk to CDMA's tech team. They're too good to talk to customers; no, we have to mediate and we can't transfer anyone to talk to them personally.

I agree, customer care for UbB needs definite work. But don't be angry at the agents for not being able to help you. We are honestly trying to help you guys out as much as we can, so much, in fact, that Boost has actually been getting a lot of us agents in trouble for trying to take steps to get a first call resolution. They say that's a thing of the past, nevermind that this was the concept that was drilled into our heads from day one. Most of us still believe in it.