I have been on the phone with Cricket Wireless on an off for about FIVE HOURS today, trying to resolve a payment issue on our phone plan.
My wife and I have been with the phone provider for years now. And every month, we make a timely payment (usually without issue) to the provider, the same way we have always done it – via Apple Pay. This morning… problem.
We checked our bank account (by the way, Ally Bank is AWESOME. Go and check them out), and it shows it to be in a pending status. But on the phone provider’s end, it shows as a failed payment. This is what one of the agents told us.
In further investigation, the same agent told us that there was an internal issue with Apple pay, that the payments come back into their failed payment system status. Sadly, while we were waiting, that same first agent hung up on us.
We checked on the issue with our bank, and they told us if the provider merely ran it as a credit transaction, the payment will go through (the previous payments were debit transactions, as was the current one was, too).
We tried to call Cricket back and explain this, but no one at the company seems to be listening to that advice. Nor, are they listening to us when we explained what a previous Cricket agent told us about THEIR internal “Apple Pay” issues. They are telling us that they can run the payment over the phone, but that would cost us an additional $5 to do so. I was like, “It’s YOUR problem – not ours. YOU all need to fix it.” To which, they basically blew us off.
As I am typing up this blogpost, I have been on the phone with (and on HOLD, bytheway) Cricket for currently 1 hour and 42 minutes!!! This is insane. But I am determined to get this matter resolved, today. This is the last day of service before the payment needs to be made. Otherwise, I’d try back in a few days.
It’s HIGHLY irritating to deal with such an incompetent company, as far as customer service goes. I know this sort of thing normally does not happen, but there should be a contingency plan for things like this. Maybe to grant us leeway time to get this rare issue processed and handled, or even to credit our account temporarily, of sorts. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve been trying to get this resolved every way I could WITHOUT having to pay extra OR to risk having the service turned off. If they could delay the termination of our account until we could get this resolved, I wouldn’t sweat this problem so much. But nothing from their end has been offered to resolve this other than “pay now, or have your service turned off at midnight.”
This issue is beyond ridiculous!