Cricket is perfectly capable of selling reader skokieguy a smartphone for several hundred dollars, but when it comes time to replace his defective battery for free under warranty, all of a sudden they become powerless.

Skokieguy writes:

I’ve have been a long-time fan of Cricket. $55.00 gets me unlimited talk / text / web, much cheaper than dealing with the big boys. Today, my happiness is now over.

My less than year old smartphone continuously reboots and has become unusable, I suspect a bad battery. So I stopped in one of the many Cricket stores I drive by on my way home. Do they have a tester for batteries to see if they are working properly? Nope. The helpful clerk removed the battery from her own phone, put it in mine and the problem went away. Hooray, we know the problem, I need a new battery.

Can they swap my battery? No, but they can sell me a battery for $25.00. Hey, but I have insurance on my phone. Well my “insurance” has a $85.00 deductible. The helpful clerk tells me since your phone is less than a year old, you can get the battery replaced for free. But we can’t do it. You’ll have to go to a “corporate” store. Here’s a list, (10 stores in the entire metro Chicago area, the closest is a half hour drive).

So I call Cricket. It took about 4 minutes to enter selections and information to get through their phone tree to customer service to reach a recording telling me customer service is not yet open.

When I get through later in the morning, I explain the problem, but the CSR says she can’t help me and says she’ll transfer me to the insurance department. I quickly interrupt that I do NOT want to speak with insurance, since I don’t want to pay a deductible and I am entitled to a free battery because the phone has a one year warranty. I ask to have the call escalated. She agrees and asks to puts me on hold. About two minutes later, the phone starts ringing, and is answered by the insurance department’s recording, telling me they are closed.

On my third call, the CSR tells me that there is no way to get my free replacement through Cricket on the web. When I signed up, they had no problem sending me a smartphone worth hundreds of dollars, but have no procedure to mail me a battery. The only way to get my battery swapped is through their corporate stores. And even though Cricket has well over 100 locations in the Chicago metro area, most of them are unable to perform basic customer service functions.

I’ve referred friends and family who have become Cricket customers. But now I am shopping for a new carrier.

The normal Cricket customer service line is a total joke, try calling 866-384-4425, press 1 and hold for a human operator to try to get some satisfaction.

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