Poor Customer Service Can Sink Wireless Carriers

On June 29, Sprint sent letters to more than 1,000 subscribers, saying their service had been terminated because of their excessive calls to customer service. When my wife and I did relief work in the Red Cross shelters in Lake Charles, LA, in the aftermath of Katrina, we let hurricane survivors use our Sprint mobile phones to make hundreds of calls throughout the course of the first week. Sprint sent me boxes to return my old devices after sending me my upgraded phones.

I wholeheartedly disagree on what Sprint has done-this, if extrapolated, could lead to the next 1,000 ‘baddest' customers being culled and if every carrier starts doing this, soon some folks will not be allowed to sign up for a phone, and that will bring in the Congress folks with their legislative handbooks….

The company is clearly relying on customer service representatives without a strong command of the English language at a time when it's increasingly evident that customer service is absolutely crucial for any retail business. Sprint Corporation is a United States telecommunications company and provides domestic wireless service and international internet.

Bottom line: coming up with strategies for handling expensive customers is an issue for nearly every company. Much of Sprint's efforts to improve the customer experience I'd classify as fixing dissatisfiers that destroy value and stimulate churn. When I asked the service representative how much of a concession the company was willing to offer for my lost time, she offered $10 worth of free minutes.

As a stand-alone company, T-Mobile has generated more wireless innovation in recent years than Apple and Samsung combined. If Sprint's worst 1,000 customers go to another carrier, that's actually a net plus for them-let someone else deal with their Demon” customers.

I called company executives Sprinting Idiots” in a comment on a 2007 CustomerThink blog post Since then, that post has accumulated nearly 15,000 views—a tiny fraction of the millions of negative impressions that the Sprint 1000” incident precipitated.

At the end of my now hour-long phone call, I asked Robert how I could register my extreme dissatisfaction with Sprint's service, and in the monotone, robotic voice of someone who had explained the answer thousands of times, he suggested I e-mail the corporate office via "dub dub dub dot sprint dot com." When he asked me if there was anything else he could do for me today, I laughed out loud and struggled to restrain myself from saying anything other than a pleasant good-bye.

If you prefer a prepaid plan, Sprint still gives you a prepaid option with unlimited text and data, or a slightly cheaper prepaid plan with a data cap. But Sprint's network continues to be its undoing: It even finished behind discount carrier MetroPCS in our speed tests, making it hard to recommend Sprint when better options are available.

Sprint has laid off at least 2,500 people, with most of the positions coming from customer service call centers throughout the US, according to Reuters The layoffs mean that Sprint is completely shutting down four of its call centers, while another two will be scaled back.

Sprint waives it if you sign up for your plan and buy your phone online. Yeah no customer service is what is ever expected but sprint is at the bottom of the pile without a doubt. Still, while I'm sticking with Sprint for now, I can't recommend the service to new customers given the way that they treat even folks who've been with them for a long time.

Leppik cites Sprint ( S ) as an example of customer service improvements - and the difficulty a company can have trying to maintain that edge. This position demanded that you be on the phone all day handling all types of issues with customers. Larger cellphone carriers AT&T and Verizon have low churn rates of approximately 1% for postpaid wireless, which means relatively few opportunities exist for Sprint to poach customers.