In which I like social media, and I don’t care who knows it.

First of all, I am a Sprint customer. Second of all, my contract’s up for renewal, which means I’m finally eligible for a new phone and I just got my tax return so maybe I could splurge a little and get a really cool one.

So I google “Sprint Android” and I click the top hit (which goes to sprint.com/android, and should take me right to the place I want to be), but instead I end up at the front page of the Sprint website, which is a customer service/sales/billing hell and so not a page containing a list of the Android phones I want to look at. In fact, I’m probably three to four levels above where I want to be.

All of which means that they’ve got a dynamic link fuck-up that’s probably costing them money. Plus, I’m irritated I have to manually drill down to the Android phones when I’ve already been online for nearly a minute and I should already be fucking looking at them.

In the old days, if I wanted to report such a thing as this, I could spend half an hour trying to find a phone number that didn’t go to the billing department, or the same amount of time trying to find an email address that didn’t go to the billing department, or I could just say the hell with it and fire off an email to (most likely abandoned-or-automated-due-to-spam) webmaster@sprint.com. Or I could just ignore it and let them look like idiots in front of the whole internet because it’s not my job to tell them they’re driving traffic to the wrong place.

Today, though, I can just send a tweet to @Sprintcare with the information, and know that it will probably get to a person savvy enough to know that an unused #1 Google search result is a huge waste of potential sales, and who will probably let the appropriate people know if internal politics hasn’t blocked them from doing so. If there’s no response, well, that’s their stupid loss, and at least I know I did the right thing in a reasonable amount of time.

In my experience, the only informed and/or rapid-response access there is to any large corporation is through the one or three people doing their social networking presence. Unlike talking to ANYONE THAT ANSWERS THE PHONE, EVER, these people often seem to know how to get information into well-protected departments, like engineering or the web team. They can also escalate weird crap to supervisors in customer service or billing, if you can convince them via DM that you’re not a conehead and/or that you’re going to puke even more vitriol all over the goddamned web if they don’t fix whatever it is that they’ve fucked up this time.

The old methods of communication with these massive entities – phone calls and emails – are useless, frustrating, bad for your blood pressure, and absolutely to be avoided. No one who answers the phone can help you with anything beyond taking a payment or selling you more services (and mis-quoting what you’ll be charged for them). It’s very, very difficult to even get supervisors on the phone (since quite often, they’re not even in the same country as the person answering the phone), and God help you if you’re trying to say anything that’s not on their script.

(You have no idea how many times I’ve called Qwest to report an infrastructure outage they didn’t know about yet, asked nicely to be escalated to third tier so I could get a tech who was capable of even knowing what I was talking about, and instead wasted hours of my one and only life being shunted from drone to drone until I finally hung up in disgust. Believe me, if you tell someone that answers the phone at Qwest that you’re “a NOC technician and you can tell from your DSLAM that no POTS traffic is coming back from the splitter,” you’re lucky if they don’t find your private bill and double it on the spot just for confusing them.)

My first experience with telephone companies on Twitter was when I badmouthed Qwest in a tweet and @talktoqwest had replied within minutes wanting to know how they could do damage control. That Qwest joined the social media revolution not to provide better care, but to stop people from complaining about their shitty service, may not be as relevant as the fact that once I was able to solve a strange issue by tweeting “Qwest customer support is useless and totally fucking sucks!”

All that will stop working soon, when social media stops being new and is no longer manned by cutting-edge geeks, and then those big corps will have the self-same idiot drones working their Twitter accounts as they do answering their phones, but for now it still seems to work. Huzzah.

Long story short, I… wait. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah: I’m shopping for a new cell phone! Squee!