Princess Sparkle Pony falls through the customer service looking glass

My friend John alerted me to an excellent customer service story he’d seen on Princess Sparkle Pony.

Princess Sparkle Pony (a.k.a., PSP) is a double oddity: no cell phone, no credit card. But PSP, like the rest of us cowpokes, is not totally immune to consuming cravings. PSP’s was for an iPhone. Here’s PSP’s story:

First I went to ATT’s web site to order the service. Now, here’s another bit of PSP trivia: I don’t have a credit card; haven’t since college! I do have a debit card, of course, but I simply don’t use credit. So at the ATT site, they did a “credit check” and found me wanting, and decided that the iPhone wasn’t for me. So I “spoke” to an online rep, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I want to get an iPhone, but failed your credit check.
Rep: Sorry, then you are ineligible for the service.
Me: Really? Just like that? But I was going to pay with a debit card.
Rep: Sorry, if you fail the credit check, you’re ineligible.
Me: Seriously? What if I pre-pay for the whole two-year plan?
Rep: We don’t offer that.

Not to take no for an answer, PSP went straight to the AT&T horse’s mouth. There, PSP found that getting an iPhone would require ante-ing up a $750 deposit for the supreme affront of not having a credit card.

The saga continues - after a trip to the not-so-local Apple store, PSP came home empty-hooved. iPhones were all out!

Given the current economic milieu, in which so many of our citizen consumers have drunk too long at the credit trough, you’d think that an upstanding, debt-free, clean-living pony could buy something with a debit-card. Verizon has figured out how to get my phone bill paid directly from my checking account each month. Don’t you think that AT&T could do this, too?

Excellent cautionary here - it’s apparently better to have a poor credit history than to have none. Still, from a customer service view point, one would hope that companies can accommodate different - excuse the marketing-ese -  “buyer personas”. Although no doubt a rarity, PSP can’t be the only person out there fitting this profile.

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