If you are on a family plan with Sprint service and also have a student or employee cellular discount applied to it, this is a quick heads-up that Sprint is raising your bill. If you look carefully on your January statement, you should find this announcement:
Discount Policy Change Notice
Effective your February bill cycle, Family and Business Share monthly plan charges will be billed differently. Discounts will only apply to the monthly recurring charge of the primary line. Line 2 will be billed at the applicable Add-a-Phone rate and will not be discount eligible.
Previously, the discounts applied to first two lines, but now it only applies to the first line. (What if both users qualified for discounts?) SprintFeed has an earlier leaked memo with example. In addition, this SprintUsers post (by an actual Sprint employee) reports that this indeed constitutes a material change to the contract, and thus gives you the ability to cancel your contract before the end date without having to pay an early termination fee (ETF). However, you must actually end your contract, as opposed to simply switching to a month-to-month basis. You’ll probably have to escalate your call to the Sprint retention department, and they may offer you some sort of incentive to stay on your plan.
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How annoying. We’re Sprint customers and this will probably hit us on the next bill. It’s ‘ONLY’ $1.80 or whatever the percentage is we get but talk about nickel and diming especially for long time customers. I doubt we’ll switch but I will probably write an article about it at some point, maybe enough exposure about nickel and diming will get some media coverage and they’ll back off future instances.
I just tried to talk to them about this problem and they had no clue what I was talking about…Anyone have any luck?
@Evan – Say you want to cancel and the first-line CSR should escalate to Account Services until you find someone who is knowledgeable.
Just got off the phone with Sprint figured I’d share what happened – Yes, they would let me out, but I didn’t really want to leave. I actually wanted to speed up The Wife’s upgrade a year early. They didn’t budge lol, but did offer me an $80 credit towards my account if I would waive my “get out of ETF card”
Successfully got out of one unwanted add on line (that had an ETF). 9.99 + taxes saved each month. Was transferred to account services, went through a bunch of questions, and then done…only thing it takes effect only end of billing cycle.
If I cancel my contract, is my numbers portable to another company?
Hi guys / ladies I called Sprint yesterday February 13, 2012 regarding this change in plan and I got out of contract without early termination fee and I get to keep the phone. Here how it works:
1. you call the main number tell them that you need to speak to the cancellation department
2. tell them that you want to cancel the line (s) because of a “material change in the contract”. In this case is that “line 2 will be billed at the applicable Add-a-Phone rate”. The way it works the employee discount that they used to give you from 129.99 dollars will be less because of this: the new main line is 110 dollars (after the change) and if you subtract the discount from this amount is less than the discount you would have gotten with 129.99 plan. So they are making more money = “material change” even if is only 4-5 dollars.
3. you must have this contract cancelled within 30 days from when the change took effect. That means you have 30 days until the February bill needs to be paid. After that you cannot do anything about it.
4. when you call them make sure that they are aware that sprint terms and condition states you can cancel all this without ETF ” I wish to cancel the contract, line(s) because of a material change to the agreement that we have made!”
I hope this will help anybody out there, hurry up guys.
Also if they give you hard time tell them that” I will setup arbitration with Better Business Bureau!” I heard that it cost them over 500 dollars for each arbitration. very important guys / ladies BE PATIENT , BE NICE and plan on being on the phone for at least 30 minutes, moved from one representative to the other, they will try to give incentives to keep you with them, discounts and so forth.
Sprint appears to have incited a large part of their customer base with a recent change they are calling a “Billing Re-structure”. It appears they’ve changed the way business partners’ discounts are applied to the bill thus increasing monthly bills, this may seem like a rate increase to most of the customers actually paying the bill each month but remember Sprint is calling it a “Billing Re-structure, doesn’t that make you feel better? No, well maybe this bit of irony will!
Most of these customers couldn’t have told you what the competition was offering much less what it cost since most were long term customers (5+ years according to customer comments on their own site) because these customers were happy with Sprint and didn’t have a reason to shop around, this meant guaranteed money in the bank each and every month for Sprint, now because of this change, these people are flooding the call centers with complaints and logging in to online chat rooms to voice their discontent but it get worse for Sprint, now these customers are getting familiar with their other options and could find out that with all the discounts for bundling services (some of which Sprint doesn’t offer!) they could get more services and pay less than they are with Sprint. And to think Sprint probably paid a team of consultants (efficiency experts!) to come in-house & evaluate their operating procedures and develop a way to maximize revenue, unfortunately it looks like the consultants they hired may actually work for the competition.