Sprint rides again, stumbles

In the hope that fellow Justin from Sprint might visit: Sprint has redesigned their site again, this time concentrating on the billing and payment section and unfortunately making it rather difficult to figure out whether you’ve paid the current bill. Formerly, on login you would be brought to a single account summary that showed your latest bill and whether you had paid it. Now it’s more complicated.

When you select Pay bill, instead of showing you the outstanding balance as the default amount to pay, it seems to think you don’t owe anything and so says the default payment is $.00. So you need to go to View bill – where it inconveniently doesn’t say whether you’ve paid or not – and note the amount of the bill, then go to Payment activity to see if you’ve paid recently, then go back to Pay bill and enter the amount you owe. Hardly efficient.

sprint-redux

My prediction is that they will soon be shutting off service to a fair number of people who mistakenly believe they’ve paid because Pay bill implies, fairly heavily, that they don’t owe anything and who then do not proceed to click here, there, and everywhere to see if it’s true.

My current bill from them is paid, but only in Payment activity can I figure that out, sort of. To fix this redesign problem, they should:

  • In View bill, show whether the bill is paid, as they used to.
  • In Pay bill, show the amount still due on the current bill next to the Total radio button as they used to, not “$.00”.

Postscript, 9 December: It appears they saw the error of their ways because they tossed their recent changes onto the scrap heap and went back to the original code. Smart move.

This and the previous episode make me wonder if the root of the problem is perhaps that Sprint employees only rarely visit their own site. I mean, they get free cell service, so who needs to pay a bill? T’huh. Proposal: Make the web programming honcho and a few lead coders pay for their cell service and reimburse them monthly. I’ll wager there would be fewer – if any – problems with rollouts of site changes from that point forward.

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