More Thoughts on Sprint

To my regular readers, I’m sorry that the blog has gone a little stale over the past week, but I’ve been a bit preoccupied trying to find a new job. Nevertheless, traffic is way, way up on the Sprint post and I have been having lots of great conversations with people who have commented on it. In lieu of a new topic, which I promise to get to this week, I’ll pass on some of those additional thoughts from my conversations. Perhaps if Sprint were a Sense & Respond organization, they would be joining in the conversation or at least be actively listening. My guess is they’re not.

Of all the comments on the post, no one defended Sprint. To the contrary, all but one had negative things to say about them. The other guy just had negative things to say about female cellphone users. Thought certainly not a statistically valid sample, I would wager that few people really love their wireless provider. It’s the nature of the industry in the US. With limited competition due to the high cost of entry, the wireless providers aren’t compelled to differentiate on customer service and in my experience, Sprint is the poor service leader.

You may have noticed that this story has gone mainstream with coverage by the Associated Press, ABC News and Brandweek . The details, if you haven’t seen them are mind-boggling. David Reich wrote a great summary today on his blog, “my 2 cents”, but here’s the big thing to consider:

Out of Sprint’s 52 Million customers, only 1000 received the letter saying they were calling customer support too much. Do the math. That’s less than .002% of their customers. There is no way that that small percentage was adding any material cost to their operation. (update:  As a friend pointed out, the actual cost of these calls could have been material; however, the methodology for counting is unclear.  For example, the ABC story indicates that a single call with 5 internal transfers might have been counted as 5 calls). Sprint says that, on average, these customers were calling in 40-50 times per month. Perhaps that’s true and given my personal experience with trying to get my own Sprint bill fixed, I can appreciate that.

Nevertheless, Sprint made the decision to go after them in a way that became very controversial, very public, very fast. The cost of this action in terms of bad PR is on par with Circuit City’s recent bungle. where they fired 3400 of their most experienced store employees to cut costs. Several months later they are still trying to explain that one, but it’s too late. In both cases, the damage to public perception has been done, although in Sprint’s case, it was pretty low to begin with and their defensive spin machine is just getting fired up. In my opinion, it was a failure of leadership in both of these companies to make such shortsighted decisions without considering how their customers would view them.

One of my conversations this week was with the Conversation Agent herself, Valeria Maltoni. She pointed me to a post she wrote about the wireless business in the US and speculates that Apple may be just the disrupter needed to shake up the industry. It’s a great post and has some David Letterman Top 10 humor to boot.

Sprint Fires Its Customers

I was a Sprint customer for a while.  I hated every minute of it.  The coverage was spotty and their ability to screw up the billing month after month was unprecedented.  Every month, I would call their support line, wait on hold for 30-40 minutes, and then have to explain the problem (usually se same problem as the previous month).  Once the contract was up, I fired them.  Today, Gizmodo is reporting that Sprint is firing some of their customers for, are you ready for this, making too many customer service calls regarding billing and other account info.

I’m not kidding!  Here it is:

As outlined in letters to certain customers, Sprint is giving them 30 days notice and then they are shuuing off their phones.  In a rare moment of weakness for cell phone carriers, Sprint is going to let these customers go without having to pay early termination fees of the last month’s bill.

I am amazed by the arrogance of this action.  I’m sure these customers have nothing better to do than to use up Sprint’s valuable customer support resources day in and day out with their silly questions.  I smell an orthodoxy here.  Something along the lines of “these customers are bad because they cost us more than they generate.”

Sprint deserves some seriously bad press over this incredibly stupid approach. 

Here’s my suggestion to Sprint:  Before you start firing your customers, you should take the time to understand the source of the problem.  It’s probably staring back at you when you look in the mirror.