Nightmare of Mind-Boggling Proportions
Written: Mar 20 '07 (Updated Mar 20 '07)
| Ease of Ordering: |
 |
|
| Customer Service: |
 |
|
| Selection: |
|
|
| On-Time Delivery: |
 |
|
|
| Full Review |
Wirefly (aka InPhonic) is a horrid, horrid company. In the past 12 months, the Better Business Bureau has received 2,187 complaints, and in the past 36 months, 3,491. That's just the people who have taken the time to file a complaint.
If you break it down, that's 182 complaints per month. Or just about six complaints a day. Or a complaint filed with the BBB every four hours.
I purchased (actually free with 2-year-service agreement) two phones. I paid for expedited shipping, yet it still took 2 or 3 days longer than I expected. (From what I've read on here, the fact that they arrived at all is a surprise.)
The phones arrived activated and ready to use. Except it wasn't our area code. To fix required 3 calls to Cingular. Which resulted in a billing error which took 2 calls and a voicemail to resolve. (But this isn't about Cingular.) Additionally, someone warned me that changing the phone number on the account could cause the account to be "de-linked" from Wirefly. That would make it look like we had cancelled service and would mean they'd charge our credit card several hundred dollars. Took three calls to Wirefly and two to Cingular to make everything was still all good.
Within 20 minutes of getting said billing issue resolved, the phone stopped working. Later research would suggest that Motorola had a history of making crummy phones that would suddenly brick-up like minee did.
Having spent enough work time trying to resolve the previous issues, I had to turn the problem over to my wife and ask her to try to resolve. Wirefly had her calling Motorola, Motorola had her calling Cingular. Cingular conferenced her in with Wirefly, only as soon as Cingular got off the line, the operator at Wirefly recanted everything they said and said she'd have to call Amazon.
When Amazon tried to conference call with her to Wirefly, they got a recording that the offices were closed.
She began again te next day and finally was able to at least get to the bottom of things. Wirefly does not do exchanges. We had two options. (1) Return both phones, our coverage with Cingular would be terminated and we could start the entire process over again or (2) Send the phone to Motorola and be without it for who knows how long. (Motorola also has a reputation of scratching and denting phones sent to them for repairs.)
We opted to send the phones back. We're out the $10 for expedited shipping and our current service shuts off on Friday. We tried again on Amazon, but directly from Amazon they're backordered, of course.
InPhonic is the largest or second largest seller of phones and runs the back-end of many cell stores online. You'll see "powered by inphonic" all over the place.
They do not publish their customer service phone number, only the sales number for Wirefly. The number is 1-888-843-2485. You'll listen to a lot of recordings trying to push you to the web, especially if you enter your order number when prompted. If you say "I don't know" the wait is much less. They will not even say "Wirefly" until after they've confirmed your identity because they handle all kinds of cell phone sales sites from United Airlines to MyPoints.
I have not yet encountered a customer service operator I could fully understand. They are all in India and have really thick accents. I've talked to all kinds of CSRs for all kinds of companies who've outsourced their call centers to India and this particular crowd has, by far, the thickest accents I've encountered. The socialist in me is all for outsourcing and sharing the wealth and providing jobs, but the cynic in me thinks they were hired for their accents or because other call centers deemed their accents to be too thick. It's sad, but they are incredibly difficult to understand.
You will be put on hold for minutes at a time seemingly at random (what, are they taking other calls and talking to me when those calls are on hold?) And you will often get conflicting information from one call to the next, or even during the same call.
At first, I suspected incomp[etance or poor training of the CSRs, but eventually I've come to the conclusion that they must be trained this way on purpose, to frustrate and confuse the customer into inaction by a greedy and criminal leadership over the company.
So, I would really recommend avoiding anything related to Wirefly or its parent company InPhonic.
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Cell phones
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
sprint_sucks
|
|
Location: Seattle, Wash.
Reviews written: 108
Trusted by: 26 members
About Me:
Crikey.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.