Sprint Drops 1,200 Customers For Complaining Too Much.

BPSCG

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Hundreds of cell phone customers are being given the boot, accused of being too high maintenance.

Sprint-Nextel is disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers on grounds the clients call customer service too often and make "unreasonable requests."

The 1,200 people getting dropped will have to find a new carrier by the end of the month.

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.

(...snip...)

The customers told to find a new service provider were notified by mail last month and will not have to pay a termination fee.
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Well, isn't that nice? Sprint is unilaterally terminating the contract and they won't charge the customers a termination fee. I'd like to know if Sprint is going to pay one to the customers, since Sprint is terminating the contract.

I bet I know the answer.

(Jeeze - calling your cell phone's customer service an average of 1.5 times a day? :yikes:)
 
Your OP was a bit confusing as to whose side you're supporting, BPSCG, but it did seem to me like these folks really were calling excessively. What did Sprint have to gain from keeping them as customers?

From another story:

Singleton said some of the cancellations involved customers who repeatedly asked for information about other people's accounts.

Sprint waived final balances on canceled accounts and gave customers 30 days to transfer their phone numbers to other wireless providers, she said.
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They're risking some bad PR over this, but they're waving final balances and termination fees to get rid of customers who were probably more trouble keeping than they will be in terminating. I have to think that things were pretty bad with these 1000+ (which is probably a teeny number relative to their total subscribers) customers for the company to take this step.

Actually, I just found this story that states that Sprint has roughly 54 million subscribers.

So why all of the fuss over 1000 or so out of 54 million?

Again, I suspect that they must have been real pains in the pooper for Sprint to do this.
 
Another theory might be these folks really wanted to switch to another provider, but with those locked-in contracts, they couldn't do so without incurring a fee. So, they complained vociferously in the hopes that Sprint would dump them.

It seems to have worked. :D
 
I don't blame them. I've had to ditch a few customers over the years that would make unreasonable requests (well, I could have fulfilled them if I was able to violate the laws of physics and chemistry). All they did was soak up time and resources and made it harder to service my other customers.

You try your best to please but when you realize nothing you do will satisfy them you have to cut them loose.
 
If you're calling customer service once or twice a day, why would you want to remain a customer in the first place? I suspect these are mostly nuts.
 
HarryKeogh said:
I don't blame them. I've had to ditch a few customers over the years that would make unreasonable requests (well, I could have fulfilled them if I was able to violate the laws of physics and chemistry). All they did was soak up time and resources and made it harder to service my other customers.

You try your best to please but when you realize nothing you do will satisfy them you have to cut them loose.
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Heh. I had a dry cleaner lose a pair of trousers on me the day I was supposed to start a new job. had to sue the bastages for $65 million.

It's true! :)
 
BPSCG said:
Link

Well, isn't that nice? Sprint is unilaterally terminating the contract and they won't charge the customers a termination fee. I'd like to know if Sprint is going to pay one to the customers, since Sprint is terminating the contract.

I bet I know the answer.

(Jeeze - calling your cell phone's customer service an average of 1.5 times a day? :yikes:)
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Good, now they can switch over to AT&T and get an Iphone, which I might add is amazing!!!:D
 
As I understand it, Sprint is a private company. Private companies reserve the right to refuse service to anyone they please, so long as it doesn't violate discrimination laws.

I worked in a restaurant, the owner of which had to "uninvite" a group of people because they were way, way, way more trouble than they were worth.


I think, with 54 million customers, that Sprint can weather this particular storm.
 
Katana said:
Your OP was a bit confusing as to whose side you're supporting, BPSCG,
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Well, on the one hand, I think some of these customers are morons with too much time on their hands, but not enough time to RTFM that came with their phones, so they call customer service to ask them how to turn the phone off so it won't ring while they're at the movies. Or demand to have Sprint tell them how to take a picture with their phone, when there's no camera built in.

But OTOH, out of 54 million customers (really? That sounds like a lot - it's about 25% of the entire US adult population...), there are bound to be a few hundred customers who are simply getting horrible service.

And I don't think Corsair 115's hypothesis is all that far-fetched either. People can be jerks that way.
 
I've been with Sprint since 2000 or so. Occasionally I have to call them up and yell at them, but it's very, very rare and they usually help me out pretty quickly.

Before Sprint, I was with AT&T and it was...Not good. At all. I understand post-SBC AT&T is not by any means the same company, but the idea of going "back" to them does not appeal to me. Even if the iPhone was free.

That said...I can see both sides on this one. I'd be understandably pissed if Sprint decided to drop me, but at the same time, I call them maybe once or twice a year at most, not 50 times a month. Sprint is also waiving the final balances--which, when you consider that many of these people probably don't make the most timely of payments, could cost them a fair bit of cash. And these folks have three weeks to find a new provider.

I can see the need to drop a customer when they've become more trouble than they're worth. I've done it myself a couple times. At the same time, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to drop a customer; dropping tons of them at once is bad PR, and if you're a public corporation, it could also give investors the jitters--it gives the impression that Sprint is going through such a cash crunch that they've resorted to firing unprofitable customers.

If they were smart, what they'd do is simply adopt an ongoing policy (as opposed to a one-off "layoff" of customers) where problem customers would be notified that their contracts would not be renewed and they would be cut off at the end of the term.
 
I have learned one thing in my career: there are some clients you can't afford to work for.
 
If my experience with Sprint was any indication, I suspect that at least some of these 1000 were not totally crazy. I had sprint back in 2002 and the service was so bad I moved to another carrier. Sprint was a nightmare of dropped calls and network unavailable messages. I was probably calling customer service close to once a day for a time because I was having problems with their service close to once a day. They may have fixed the problem, but I will never do business again with them.

No problems after switching providers.

Daredelvis
 
I've been a Sprint customer a couple of times, succumbing to the lure of (promised) cheap service. After two miserable experienced, I swore off of them. Never again.
BPSCG said:
Heh. I had a dry cleaner lose a pair of trousers on me the day I was supposed to start a new job. had to sue the bastages for $65 million.
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That was you??:eek:
 
I think it's pretty brave. Since I have spent far too much of my life precious dealing with the public, I have to say, that small fraction can cost a lot of man hours. If they found that a small number of customers (and in this case it is relatively small) that are flooding customer service, it's a sound move.

When I had to cover tech support at one of my last jobs, I had some would-be female cop take up nearly all my time for two days because she was unhappy she had to disable her pop up blocker for our product website. Thousands of customers per week, and sixteen hours wasted on one person. There comes a time when it costs too much money to maintain folks like that.
 
I really, really, really don't see the problem with this.

calling twice a day pretty much indicates that you're either

1)too stupid to own a phone, or
2)dissatisfied with the service

Sprint is doing them (and themselves) a favor.

be reason 1 or 2, sprint is making a wise move. Let them move on to other providers. It can only profit them, regardless of the publicity.
 
One other aspect of this, which I didn't think of before, is that now every customer is going to think twice about calling customer "support" lest they cross that magical threshold and be considered a "problem customer" who needs to be let go.

Of course, with Sprint, like most other major companies, "support" consists of a heavily-accented individual (who calls himself "Bradley") reading through a script of issues that don't apply to your situation.
 
Rob Lister said:
I really, really, really don't see the problem with this.

calling twice a day pretty much indicates that you're either

1)too stupid to own a phone, or
2)dissatisfied with the service
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Your forgot:

3) Sprint screwed something up and you're having trouble getting it resolved because "Bradley" is ill-equipped to deal with actual problems.
 
quixotecoyote said:
Isn't that #2?
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Not necessarily. I don't get "dissatisfied" when they screw something up; I expect people/companies to screw up every now and then. It happens.

I usually don't get "dissatisfied" until after I've been calling them repeatedly and getting the runaround from "Bradley." And I suppose that's the point where Sprint would come in and declare me a "problem." :D
 
How is Sprint able to unilaterally terminate a legally binding contract?
 
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