Part one: On Father's Day, I arrived at the Sprint store with another sprint account owner to transfer their phone/number to my sprint account and then wanted to swap out their old flip phone for a new smartphone that was received as a gift on Father's Day. The Sprint employee at the store was absolutely useless!! He told me to go home and log in to sprint.com and do it myself online. I asked if the process that must be completed would be intuitively obvious and spelled out in detail on the website once I logged on to Sprint.com and he just stared at me blankly. His response was not encouraging, so I asked if he had a kiosk in the store that I could log on to start the process and (if need be) seek his assistance. He appeared to be extremely happy to tell me "Nope!". I smiled politely and told him if he continues to send Sprint customers home to do the 'work', his Sprint store will close down due to lack of customer service!
Part two: I logged on to Sprint.com and what was needed to complete the process was not at all clear. I called a Sprint customer support and Karen, the representative (who was extremely helpful and professional) ended up spending 1.5 hours with me on the phone to simply 'transfer ownership' of the phone number/line to my account and for her to verify that my current family plan pricing would NOT change. SPRINT now has up to 5 business days to approve the transfer of the line and only after that time will I be able to swap out the old flip-style cell phone for the smartphone received on Father's Day. More than likely I will need to do this online as well.
I've been with Sprint long enough that remember when I used to be able to walk into a Sprint store and the staff could actually help me.....