Kevin Beaver's Security Blog

CLEAR’s customer no-service

CLEARly incompetent – that’s how I rate @CLEAR Wireless’ customer service. I signed up for their service about 6 weeks ago. It actually works pretty well. Great download speeds and so-so upload speeds. Still, overall, WiMax is an amazing technology.

As much as I liked it I just couldn’t bear the slow upload speeds so I decided to take the hit on the two months of service I prepaid for and cancel my service. According to their return policy I have the right to return the wireless modem within 30 days so I took them up on that.

I first went to a CLEAR store in the mall but the gentleman there said I needed to call their 888 number and have them send me a “shipping label”. So I did…First I spoke with Karen (who, by the way, was not aware of their return policy and wanted me to fax her a copy of their policy – funny). I called back the next day as instructed and spoke with Jeanette…She was going to send out the return mailing label. About two days passed and nothing.

I had to call back and spoke with Patty in customer no-service who assured me that my mailing label was on its way. I *finally* received this elusive mailing label and low and behold it wasn’t valid. After spending 3-4 days going back and forth with UPS they realized that the mailing label wasn’t valid because it had already been used. UPS told me to contact the shipper. You can imagine how pleased I was to find that out. 🙂

So I called CLEAR’s customer no-service and spoke with Rob again….This was on Friday, nearly 4 days ago. He proceeded to ask me about the problem I had with their service…Huh uh, I wasn’t going down that path again. He then wanted me to give him the MAC address of the modem I was returning. I didn’t have it with me at the time and politely asked that he go ahead and send out another label. Rob assured me he was going to send one out – it would go out within the next 2 hours and I’d have it within 24 hours he said.

Guess what folks?? No label. Holy moly! Here I am 12 days later and I *still* have the darned modem. U-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-e. Given that I’ve put ~3 hours of my time in returning this device I would’ve been better off just throwing it out the window…or donating it….or smashing it with a sledgehammer.

Perhaps a chargeback is in order…Or maybe I should write to their VP of Customer No-Service. I’m running out of ways to get their attention. Simply amazing….

Thinking about CLEAR? Buyer beware! Pretty good Internet access; awful, awful, awful handling of (former) customers.

Unless and until CLEAR can prove to be better than Comcast and AT&T at customer service (that wouldn’t take much), they’ll continue on in their wayward ways.

For now though, steer clear of CLEAR, seriously.

Oh, if anyone from CLEAR is reading this: Just send me my darned mailing label and we can be done with this.