On the day that Sprint tooted its horn as being the leading U.S. carrier in terms of customer satisfaction, the wireless operator’s service went down covering nearly the entire Austin, Texas metro area. Local station KEYE TV reported that “a marathon repair effort is underway on Tuesday to get Sprint back up and running in the Austin area.”
The station further reported that, “The carrier wouldn’t disclose why, but a spokesperson did confirm the disruption wasn’t weather related.”
While the juxtaposition of Sprint’s customer satisfaction press release against the KEYE TV story on the outage probably made for some door slamming at Sprint’s PR department, and a greater feeling of shadenfreude at AT&T’s HQ, the most interesting aspect of this story to me is on the implications it will have on the attitude towards managed services among U.S. operators.
While Sprint – and its prime managed services partner, Ericsson – can point to the leading customer satisfaction results as a vindication of a comprehensive managed services strategy, the fact that Sprint came off in the KEYE news story as almost completely in the dark about what was going on with its network was damaging. It indicates that, at the very least, the communications channels between the company in charge of running the network and the company whose reputation is on the line with end users failed miserably yesterday in Austin.
Sprint is almost certainly going to be on the hook for rebating most of its Austin customers for the roaming charges that they incurred during the outage. I’d like to know how much that is going to cost Ericsson, both monetarily, and in Goodwill.
