King Kong Sprint Kills Customers
By Gibbs, Mark
And interesting thing just happened: Sprint Nextel “fired” about 1,000 customers. That’s rigight – Sprint sent them letters and told them they needed to find another cell phone carrier because it didn’t want their business! Why didn’t Sprint want their money? Well, apparently the customers were too needy. According to Sprint, each of these customers placed 50 or more calls per month to customer service after they weren’t satisfied with the resolution of a problem. Sprint’s letter to the customers explained:”While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.”
The letters said the customers wouldn’t owe anything on their final bill and that Sprint would waive early termination fees. How very decent.
Sprint’s logic was that these customers were reducing their customer-service capability It is worth noting that back in May MSN Money conducted a survey to find the “Customer Service Hall of Shame” (www.nwdocfinder.com/9671), and Sprint Nextel was the worst by far, not just of telecoms providers, but the worst company in America! They beat the joint second-place holders, Bank of America and Comcast, by being 33% worse.
My old friend, David Strom, in his regular and long-running “Web Informant” newsletter, carried an opinion piece on the topic (www.nwdocfinder.com/9672) by Larry Walsh, ex-editor of VARBusiness magazine, in which Walsh defended Sprint’s decision.
Wash’s thinking was that “there are such things as good and bad customers . . . bad customers cost more money than they make.” He is right. If you have unprofitable customers, they are a problem. But any rational analysis of Sprint’s “problem customers” would have concluded that the PR nightmare was more costly than the customers.
Consider Sprint has 54 million subscribers, and the average customer makes one customer-service call per month (which seems kind of high, but maybe that says something about Sprint’s service). That means that about 0.00093% of the service calls are from “bad” customers. Wow.
The problem with this is that Sprint is King Kong, and the customer is the winsome Fay Wray King Kong can do with Fay what he pleases – not let her go no matter how much she screams, carry her up the Empire State Building and dangle her over the precipice, rip her in two – you name it. Sprint, along with every other cellular carrier, has more power to manipulate the customer than the customer has to seek satisfaction.
For example, I haveT-Mobile service, which stinks. Can I get out of my contract and go to another carrier? Only if I pay an early termination fee.There’s no way I can get out of that commitment while TMobile only has to provide a best-effort service. Without Bill Gates’ resources, there’s no way I could hope to win should I want to fight the termination fee.
Perhaps I should start calling T-Mobile customer service 50 times every month.The trouble is I don’t have the time. Talking to “Bob” in an overseas call center that often would drive me insane, and no matter how bad T-Mobile is, it can’t be as dumb about PR as Sprint. I guess I’ll just have to suffer through my contract.
Check out Gibbsblog for another Sprint PR goof.
Send your comments to backspin@gibbs.com.
Copyright Network World Inc. Jul 23, 2007
(c) 2007 Network World. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.