Originally Posted By Elderp This is funny. After ranking the lowest in customer satisfaction how do they respond? They dump their 1000 biggest complainers. I would find this hilarious normally, but I happen to be a Sprint customer. As long as they excuse the early deactivation fee they can dump me too. There are tons of cellphone companies out there. <a href="http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/SprintDumpingCustomers.aspx?GT1=10221" target="_blank">http://articles.moneycentral.m sn.com/Investing/Extra/SprintDumpingCustomers.aspx?GT1=10221</a>
Originally Posted By x Pirate_Princess x there's a WikiHow on how to get out of your cell contract with no fees. Guess some people were reading that!!! LOL I think it's funny. Most people here have Sprint since it's the best reception in the area. My BF has it, and I have t-mobile, and he ALWAYS has service. Me, never, if I'm inside. At least they didn't have to pay.
Originally Posted By wahooskipper If you read other articles regarding the story, the folks they are "dumping" are abusing the customer service lines. They call 50-60 times a month with ridiculous questions, comments, concerns. They literally have too much time on their hands. Frankly, I don't blame them for dumping them. Some customers just aren't worth it. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why Disney doesn't have a 1-800 number? They would be deluged with stupid calls.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>If you read other articles regarding the story, the folks they are "dumping" are abusing the customer service lines. They call 50-60 times a month with ridiculous questions, comments, concerns. They literally have too much time on their hands.<< That's what Sprint's saying, and there's little question that some of the customer's do this. But there's also plenty of people who have posted their stories online over this. One woman says she'd been with them 7 years and averaged calling in 1 or 2 times a month. But Spring screwed up her bill a couple of months ago and she had to keep calling since they'd never fix it. Another says she kept calling back because they kept hanging up on her. All of Sprint's customers, not just these, rate their customer service as abysmal.
Originally Posted By mrichmondj I've been with Sprint for 8 years and never encountered a serious problem with their customer service. I've called on a number of occasions over the years. No one has ever hung up on me and all of my problems have been resolved, even some very complex ones. Sometimes it may take a little more effort to communicate a problem to a customer service representative, but that's just a matter of dealing with people in general and not faulty customer service. A lot of people mistake the two. How many million customers does Sprint have? They are cancelling 1,000 accounts -- not hardly a significant amount of the total subscriber base. This is no different than DL banning guests for life when they have been identified for causing disturbances in the theme parks or promoting untoward activities.
Originally Posted By ecdc I suppose I'm sensitive to this story because I work for a cell phone company - Verizon. Our big push that we've been focused on for the last year is to improve our customer service. We routinely finish first or second (behind T-Mobile - a good company, actually) in customer service. But we also have come to recognize that we're essentially the proverbial prize winning pig; it's an industry that overall has lousy service. The cell phone industry has for years relied on what have come in the business world to be known as "bad profits" - money customers don't want to pay and aren't happy to pay. They're stuck in long contracts and pay for cell phone overages. Verizon wants to change that. It's a process that takes years; overages and contracts won't go away overnight (if at all), but it can get better. So for me to see Sprint just dumping their difficult customers is a bit obnoxious. It's certainly something Verizon wouldn't do (although we have dumped extremely abusive customers). And again, lest anyone think I'm just playing the "my company's better" card, I think T-Mobile is an excellent company. If they expand their network to Verizon's size and quality, they'll be tough competition if they also maintain their customer service and low prices.
Originally Posted By mrichmondj On the flip side, by dropping the very small percentage of customers who are tying up the customer service lines far in excess of what should be considered reasonable, Sprint may actually be improving customer service for the vast majority of their subscribers by reducing hold times and access to customer service representatives.
Originally Posted By ecdc BTW, great to see you back in World Events. I've missed your perspective on Iraq.
Originally Posted By mrichmondj I haven't really been away, just lurking mostly. Lots of other stuff on the list of things to do right now.
Originally Posted By EdisYoda As someone who used to work for Nextel, who at the time, had the best customer service. I can say that Sprint bought Nextel because of well they were doing. They tried to change Nextel into Sprint's way of doing things and guess what? They are now the worst in customer service. They just didn't get it... and still don't.
Originally Posted By SoThisIsLove ecdc: Are you one of the guys that's always following me around? *gasp* Do you have dark hair and wear glassed and wear kind of a geeky suit?!?! You're a celebrity!
Originally Posted By SuperDry <<< As someone who used to work for Nextel, who at the time, had the best customer service. I can say that Sprint bought Nextel because of well they were doing. They tried to change Nextel into Sprint's way of doing things and guess what? They are now the worst in customer service. They just didn't get it... and still don't. >>> I've seen this sort of thing happen from a distance in several industries. And one thing seems to always be in common: the people responsible for ruining a better-performing acquisition, who work for the larger but lesser-performing acquiring company, NEVER come to understand what has actually happened, even when things end in disaster and often they themselves have been forced out of the company. I guess it's fair to say that if they knew at the time that what they were doing was wrong, they wouldn't have done it, but it's the not recognizing it after the fact and always blaming external factors for the poor performance that gets me. And I think this is highly relevant to LP, as I see this sort of battle between fundamentally differing mentalities going on within TWDC (although not due to acquisition). And very thankfully, it looks like those that "just don't get it" are finally being marginalized and moved out of positions of influence. It's much easier to fix the problems that way than it ever is to try to get them to understand. I meant to say this over in one of the Disney Current Events thread, but EdisYoda's comments reminded me of it here.
Originally Posted By SuperDry Regarding Sprint customer service, I recently had a few occasions to call them. I have a wireless data card with them for my laptop but no voice service. This seems to often throw them for a loop, as I must fall into a somewhat unusual category of customer. When calling for support, the phone menu prompts me for my phone number. When I selected the option for "I'm a customer but don't know my number" it told me to find it and call back, then hung up! There was apparently no way to get to a human without knowing your phone number. Since I'm a data customer, I've never had to use the phone number even once. There's actually no way to use the phone number, so I have no reason to know it. Anyway, I was having a driver problem, and had a surprisingly pleasant experience with their data technical support. I was expecting the worst, but got someone that actually seemed to understand a thing or two about computers and Windows and was able to solve my problem.
