Sprint Nextel boots unhappy customers

Sprint Nextel Corp. is cutting loose subscribers who eat up its customer service resources, despite several quarters of struggling to hold onto users.
However, the carrier is adamant that “the vast majority of our customer base is not affected” and that only a “very small percentage” of subscribers with apparently irresolvable service issues were involved, according to Sprint Nextel spokeswoman Roni Singleton.
According to a letter received and posted by a subscriber on SprintUsers.com, the company explained that during the past year, the customer had made frequent calls related to billing and other account information.
“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,” the letter read, and went on to say that the company would terminate her service contract as of July 30. No early termination fee would be charged, and the customer’s account received a credit that brought it to a zero balance, Sprint Nextel said-although the subscriber, who told fellow Netizens that she had been a customer with the carrier for seven years, said she already had a zero account balance.
The Sprint Nextel user who posted her letter claimed that she had averaged two customer service calls per month since January and fewer prior to that, and that the calls were due to errors in the carrier’s billing that she was trying to resolve. She had been quite happy with her plan, she explained, which had been built up with a series of valuable perks as she re-signed contracts with the carrier over the years. “Wouldn’t it be better for them to stop making errors, rather than making them, then booting paying customers for calling to fix the errors?” she added.
Singleton said that the decision to cancel some subscribers came after long deliberation and an audit of Sprint Nextel accounts.
“When we reviewed the accounts, we saw that this very small percentage had issues that they had felt Sprint could not resolve,” Singleton said. Such customers, she said, had “repeatedly called in an excessive amount of times, over an extended period of time-six months and in some cases, even a year. We were not able to resolve their situations in a way that was satisfactory to them, despite our best efforts.”
Some of the extreme situations involved “hundreds” of calls per month, Singleton said, and if the carrier couldn’t resolve the issues, then it needed to terminate the service relationship in order to maintain customer care standards for its other customers. She estimated that around 1,000 customers were affected.
“We really are striving to provide excellent customer service,” Singleton said. “We have set some targets for prompt call response and we’re monitoring very closely situations where customers have to call multiple times to resolve issues, because we want to be able to provide all of our clients with excellent customer service. We’ve got to make sure that if it comes to a point where someone is calling 100 times a month or 300 times per month, for an extended period of time . that indicates even through our best effort we weren’t resolving it, and it takes away from the care that we are able to provide our other 53 million customers, and it’s really best to terminate the relationship.”
The carrier lost 220,000 postpaid subscribers during the first quarter and made several advertising and leadership changes in recent weeks, with an emphasis on improving the customer experience as well as leadership changes pertaining to corporate strategy and new product development.