[barend]

Sprint to 1,000 customers: You're fired
The cell-phone company cans some of its customers for complaining too much. Told 'we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,' they have a month to find a new provider.

Sprint Nextel is hanging up on 1,000 of its cell-phone subscribers because, the company said, they complained too much.

Sprint Nextel (S, news, msgs), which ranked at the top of MSN Money's Customer Service Hall of Shame in April, apparently didn't appreciate when people called their customer-service lines to voice complaints, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. So the company told those unhappy customers to hit the road.

"The number of inquiries you have made to us . . . has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs," Sprint said in its letter.

The letter, dated June 29 and reproduced on the Web site gizmodo.com, tells customers: "We understand that having to switch to another wireless carrier may be an inconvenience. . . . So, a credit has been applied to your account to bring your current balance to zero." Sprint also said it would waive its early termination fee.

But those dumped customers don’t have much time to act. Sprint said it would terminate their contracts, giving those customers until the end of July to find new wireless carriers.

After Sprint was told that it ranked at the bottom of MSN Money’s customer service rankings, a spokeswoman said that "there are definitely areas within customer service where we need to improve" and that "our CEO and others all have said we're committed to doing that."

Article

Thanks to Reiner for this story.

90% calls about unlocking the phone no doubt.

[Deepsycher]

Typical in seeing a similar attitude of "We have the mass majority to serve so why should YOU be any DIFFERENT!"

Sprint

Seriously pathetic rejections in negative talk

So poor really inconsiderably nonsensically terminating

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 17 July 2007 - 07:41 PM

[Bond]

Sprint

Stupid phone records indicate noxious telemarketers.

[Deepsycher]

Hehe I like that.

Sprint

Shy people refuse insulting negative tones

[Bond]

Thanks!


Sprint

Silly peckers rewrite negotiation transactions.

This post has been edited by Bond: 17 July 2007 - 11:34 PM

[reiner]

I will relate to you what I did to Barend. I think this is a smart move on the part of Sprint in terms of money. As far as PR, it's not necessarily good. These customers (1000 of them) are most likely high call volume on the service lines. They will call and rack up so many minutes in service requests to their representatives that it is most likely costing them more money to keep them than they are making back. I can garner from the area that they are in, wages for these reps are around 10 USD an hour. Let's say you call in and have an issue with your bill that takes around 30 minutes to handle. Your request has cost Sprint/Nextel 5 USD. Not a problem. Now let's consider that a basic plan probably runs around 50 USD a month without any frills. You have an issue (or think you do with some folks) and you spend 1 and 1/2 hours on the line. That's 15 USD, leaving 35 USD for everything else. This money usually goes into phone costs (via contracts and discounted hardware) and other maintenence. Now if you know anything about doing over the phone support, there are some people who just constantly call in for various reasons (real issues that take a lot of time, they are inept, they can't grasp a certain concept, they refuse to be helped, they demand some sort of higher standard, etc). These can easily rack up more operational costs than they are pulling in to keep the customer. I for example did ISP tech for multiple ISPs at one time. One had a gentleman who made 30+ calls per month, most related to pornography, email spam issues or his digital camera (which we did not support) and probably racked up about 20 hours a month. This cost the ISP 160 USD per month and they had a temporary ban on him. Honestly I can sympathize. You can't please everyone, but you have to cut your losses.

But honestly from a PR standpoint, this sounds terrible. Almost as if they're refusing service to these people. In reality it's a bit tit for tat. They can honestly support these people (most people will never call a support line for a particular product) but Sprint has ALWAYS been stingy. They lay off and rehire workers constantly.

Thankfully, I've never worked there. Their IT departments hired heavily out of my school. I swore I would never work at a place whose World HQ looks like a WWII Polish ghetto. I should find pictures, it's an absolutely depressing compound.

[Bond]

All right, then. Thanks for thoroughly explaining the situation.

[optimus_prime]

Ah, Low and behold my fellow Chefelfers. I had the unforntunate experience of actually working for Sprint PCS for 4 1/2 years.

I know a lot about Sprint, when I was fired, it was right before the Sprint PCS/Nextel merger. (Jan 2005)

I can tell you that this is a very greedy company. They also put their customer first, and will rarely stand behind their employees when it comes down to it. I do admit I was making quite good salary, but the job got to be quite stressful at times

Sprint will take in anyone to be their customer, thats how greedy they are. The main reason why they decided to cut 1,000 customers off, is because they researched and found that these customers were calling in so damn much, it was actually taking away from their overall rate of employee productivity

(i.e. the employee could be taking a call from a customer with a valid concern, rather than bullshitting around with some customer that simply trying to tie down their lines)

If you have any questions I can answer for you about Sprint, let me know, I will tell all as I thoroughly despise them.

[Deepsycher]

I hear the saying "The customer is always right" no matter how wrong they are. No way am I like that but I was mis sold an expensive limited telephone/internet dialup package I didn't was ask for once resulting into an argument to cancel the fixed contract.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 18 July 2007 - 07:23 AM

[reiner]

Ah, Low and behold my fellow Chefelfers. I had the unforntunate experience of actually working for Sprint PCS for 4 1/2 years.

That sounds horrific

[Slade]

OP: That's exactly what reiner was saying.

I think they ditched these customers partially to eventually make themselves look better. If there are less dissatisfied customers because said customers were removed from their service, then they look like they have better customer service.

Call centers seem to be predominantly managed by idiots, or good managers are given stupid orders by greedy companies. Where my dad works, the only thing that is important is getting customers off the phone as fast as possible. It doesn't even matter to the company whether they are actually helped or not.

[optimus_prime]

the only thing that is important is getting customers off the phone as fast as possible. It doesn't even matter to the company whether they are actually helped or not.

i cant begin to tell you just how true that is. call centers set standards for average call handle time, that is, the combined time rate for all the calls you take in a single day/hour, etc.

the goal is usually somewhere around 5 to 7 minutes, depending upon the company and/or objectives that must be handled during the call.

in addition to having to resolve the customers issue in that timeframe, you are also usually required to say about 5 or 10 mandatory statements, usually read from some stupid script prompter on your screen, or mentally etched into your brain by the company.

and if worse comes to worse, your company may also place sells objectives on you, where you have to make a sells pitch on every call, and are also expected to meet a ridiculous sales quota for some crappy product/service that hardly any customer really needs or wants.

sprint was chock full of sales pitches. they had a service called voice command. which, no customer really needs. basically it cost like $5.oo a month, and it was supposedly suppose to work by recognizing your own voice and dialing whatever number you say. trouble is, the damn thing hardly worked in most cases, and just ended up as being a tech ticket sent over to sprint's half-ass tech dept. ..usually with the customer on the line, and being required to do a bunch of dumb shit, like remove the battery from their phone, read off serial numbers, msn numbers, resetting their phone, etc, etc,

I think they ditched these customers partially to eventually make themselves look better. If there are less dissatisfied customers because said customers were removed from their service, then they look like they have better customer service.

...and their stock looks better,..that was so fucking important to upper management, making sure sprints stock always looked good on the dow jones/nasdaq.

trouble is, sprints stock was usually piss poor when compared with other cell providers.

[Bond]

Thanks to this snafu, Sprint's probably going to be down the f*cking toilet pretty soon.

[reiner]

Nah they'll be fine. Their cell phone services don't strike me as their sell point.

[Bond]

All right, then.