I just had a wonderful experience with SPRINT. I am finally getting close to the robbery that has happened to me in the last two years for the cell phone contract I have. In US, cell phone services are already very expensive and on top of that, I had to pay extra money to get a cell phone because I was an international student( and didn't have a SSN at that time). So my plan was...54 dollars/month for 300 minutes and no SMS messages( and I would pay if someone sent a message to me!!!). They also took a 125 dollar deposit for a year for not having a Social Security Number....and by the way, the phone is the worst piece of junk you can get anywhere in the world.
Well, the day I had been waiting for was finally arriving. I was ready to say Bye Bye to Sprint as soon as my 2 year contract got over. So I called up today, 4 days before the final date and told the first person who picked up in Customer Care that I wanted to cancel my contract and want some information about it. He said, let me transfer you to someone. So I said OK and then I wait for 15 minutes before someone comes online. And then this woman first talks to me in a weird way and then tells me that the contract would expire on 29th August and not 29th July. I am getting pissed for the way she is shouting at me. She kept insisting that 29th August was the final date of the contract and that I need to get my facts right...well, I DID!!
So I hang up and call again telling this time that I wanted to renew my contract. I get transferred in not more than 10 seconds and I am told that my contract would expire on 29th July!!
I have had really bad customer service experiences in the past but majority of them were probably because representatives were not trained properly. In this case, I am reasonably sure that the response of the woman to tell me a wrong expiration date was a decision which came from the top. So the rule behind the script would have been something like this:
1) If the contract is going to expire soon( some days might be specified here...probably 5 or 10) and person calls up to tell that he would not renew it, tell him to wait for the next representative.
2) Make him wait for at least 15 minutes.
3) If he is still on the phone, talk to him and tell him a wrong delayed expiration date.
I think the script went wrong when the woman got angry for my prodding. Really, if you have to fool someone, you have to be really cool about it.And if you have to super fool someone then you have to be supercool about it!!
More importantly, my point is this: My guess is that Sprint would have at least 60 million customers in US. Assuming a very conservative churn rate of 10% a year, you have 6 million customers leaving every year, which is 500,000 customers a month. If 5,000 of these customers get fooled by what just happened with average monthly bill of 30 dollars, that's 150,000 dollars added to the top line per month...
By the way, I have the Federal Communication Commission(FCC) number (1-888-225-5322)where I am going to call and complain about this. I hope my call was recorded( of course for quality control purposes!!) and I hope this malpractice comes out in open. For some reason, I am very certain that it was not an innocent mistake on the part of the harmless, and otherwise benign, call center rep.
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Great Moments In Customer Service: Sprint Cans 1,200 Subscribers For Complaining
Do you ever feel like your wireless carrier just doesn't care about you? Well, get a load of this. Sprint this week said it plans to cut off 1,200 subscribers for making too many calls to customer service. What is the real problem here? That these customers were making too many calls? Or that Sprint cared more about the bottom line than providing quality service?
Here is a look at this sterling example of customer care:
A Sprint representative said the average customer calls customer service less than once a month, but the 1,200 clients getting the boot call 40-50 times as often.
Sprint said whatever the complaint, it has worked to resolve it but due to the volume of calls it's obvious customers involved are not happy.
So Sprint has decided to call it quits and terminate these people from their contracts rather than try to work things out.
Now, I realize that some of these customers were probably high maintenance and could never be satisfied, no matter what. But I am willing to bet that a good portion of them actually had real problems that Sprint simple didn't work hard enough to solve. And that's sad.
It seems that a growing number of businesses today are more interested in a quick buck than in doing the heavy lifting needed to build real, long term relationships with their customers. Again, I realize some of these people were probably perpetual complainers that had to be let go. But how many of these subscribers were simply victims of poor network coverage? How many of them were trapped with faulty phones that they couldn't upgrade? And who deserves our pity? The last time I checked, the customer was king.
What do you think? Do you think Sprint was right to cut these subscribers off? Or is this just another example of the decline in customer care among larger companies?
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