BusinessWeek has a truly excellent article about the customer service meltdown that lead to Sprint’s current notorious reputation for poor customer service. The article sums up what we’ve been reporting over the past year: After the Sprint/Nextel merger, “customer service” was essentially destroyed as a concept at the new company. The CSRs were rigidly timed and judged only on how short their calls were and how many contract extensions they were able to bring in. Even bathroom breaks were monitored, one ex-Sprint CSR told BusinessWeek.
“Churn,” the industry term for rate of customer retention, went from being a priority at Nextel to an afterthought at Sprint. CSRs that were judged on how many problems they solved for Nextel’s customers were suddenly being told to shorten their call times at any cost. More troubling is the fact that large cash bonuses were offered to reps who met contract extension goals, a tactic that may have resulted in corrupt CSRs extending contracts without the customer’s consent. This issue is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the Minnesota attorney general’s office.
From BusinessWeek:
Allegations in the two lawsuits against Sprint raise questions about how far Sprint workers went in meeting those sales quotas. Selena L. Hayslett, a realtor from Apple Valley, Minn., says she called Sprint Nextel four times in late 2006 to dispute charges on her bill. Then she realized that each time she called, Sprint was extending her contract, without her consent, according to an affidavit filed in one of the suits. “I felt tricked,” said Hayslett.
Her complaint is included in a lawsuit filed by the Minnesota attorney general, alleging that Sprint extended contracts when customers made small changes to their service. “It’s kind of like the Hotel California,” says Lori Swanson, the attorney general, “where you can check in and never leave.”
Sprint’s case should serve as a warning to companies that view “customer service” in the light that Sprint did. The company’s new CEO, Daniel “At Least I’m Not Gary Forsee” Hesse, says they’ve learned their lesson:
“We weren’t talking about the customer when I first joined,” says Hesse. “Now this is the No. 1 priority of the company.”
Sprint’s Wake-Up Call [BusinessWeek]
(Photo:Meghann Marco)
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I made the mistake of signing up for Sprint a year ago before I found The Consumerist.
My company qualifies me for a discount, which I called and asked for. They said they’d give it to me, but it has never appeared on my bill.
I have called the customer service line several times when I thought I had a problem, but NEVER got through to a live person. I ended up fixing the problem through their website.
As soon as my contract is up a year from now, I’m switching to someone else for sure unless CS gets dramatically better.
@shadow735:
4: Have a SERO plan and pay less than half the price for a similar plan at another carrier.
My coworker just signed up for a 200 minute, unlimited data plan through Verizon. I asked how much she was paying a month and when she replied with “80 bucks”, I just about covered my cube wall with the water I was drinking. I’m on the 500 minute, $30/month SERO plan and barring any egregious mishaps with Sprint, there’s no way you’d get me to go with anyone else.
Sprint needs to take it’s head out of it’s ass, go to Korea, hire 20-30 of their people from the cell phone companies there and start implementing the superior service here.
Once that is done, at a LARGE cost I am sure, it will put them back in the lead again.
Stop paying the suits in the US, who sit on their ass doing NOTHING, money that if it was put into upgrading the service would have turned to profit long ago.
You are seeing it with FIOS now, soon Comcast and others will be tossed out thanks to the new tech.
Go ahead and make fun, but I’m a happy Sprint customer. I’ve been with Verizon and AT&T in the past and for my needs, Sprint has worked out the best. The great thing is, with their company problems, you can use this to your advantage. I recently signed up for a family plan to bring my parents into the 21st century and talked them into this:
- 4 new Katana 2s for $30 (parents, brother and gf)
- 200 Minutes/Month
- Free Text messaging
- $5 unlimited Internet for my Treo
- paided no fees to sign up the new 4 phones
For $79.99/month and I get a 33% off from my employer.
My total bill is under 60 bucks a month for 200 mins and 5 phones. Can’t beat that
Having worked for a helpdesk, this is stat-centric approach is the classic method used to run CS centers now. Most of the time, the managers themselves couldn’t help a customer to save their life. Their experience with helpdesk management and customer service is the usual platitudes they read in a book but not based on actual genuine, “I have worked at a helpdesk” experience. This lack of experience often leads to moronic and inept goals and procedures based entirely on the spreadsheet management style.
Spreadsheet managers are ones who really have no clue what they are doing so every decision is based on a spreadsheet report generated from the call system and ticketing system. Nothing else. Data correlation across different reports is beyond their ability to comprehend. Correlating problems from multiple departments to get a better understanding of an issue is also beyond them. Their knowledge is truly limited to “this number must go up, this one down.”
As a result of the spreadsheet style that the HD managers (and those above them) love, the employees are simply measured by certain set statistics (say calls take per hour, talk time per call, tickets created, sells made, etc). If it can’t be counted, it didn’t happen. The CSR that manipulates the data (rather then simply doing good work) is the one that appears to shine to management.
So the CSR whose work resulted in 10 happy customers, taking 10 minutes per call would actually get chewed out compared with the CSR that failed 10 customers, taking only 5 minutes per to do that. After all, a spreadsheet doesn’t track customer satisfaction (that’s a separate report in another department so not considered related).
For managers, the goal is essentially 100%, X numbers of called answered in per hour, with Y seconds hold time while using the fewest number of people as possible. The goal isn’t to get enough people to do the job well, the goal is to get as few people as possible to just skate by. A single person calling in sick would blow the stats for the day.
An example: Say 10 people answering 10 calls per hour for 100 throughput, average talk time of 6 minutes. If you are spreadsheet manager, this seems too high, so you force the employees to go to three minutes or less resulting needing only 5 employees “helping” the same 100 customers. Now anyone with CS experience would groan at this knowing the pitfalls, usually meaning little or no genuine customer services is occuring, but if you’re the helpdesk manager, this is an improvement. More important, the HD manager’s bosses see the same spreadsheet and the savings of employing five people and reward him for his excellent work.
The end result is you have incumbent mangers being encouraged by more incompetent managers to continue inept behavior that results in the department failing at its one and only task – giving customer service.
A spreadsheet manager is the warning sign of an inept idiot who plays the game well but unable to run a department. They are legion, for their managers are just like them.
I used to think AT&T had terrible customer service until I ran up against Sprint! My son got a family plan for himself and my wife and I, then was deployed to Iraq. He successfully suspended the phone but then after about 6 months, Sprint started charging him for piddling amounts for the Al Gore tax, etc. Whenever I called the CSR would say “they must be correct, they are mandatory,etc”. I finally drove over to the local Sprint store and found that if I wasn’t a potential new customer, they wanted no part of me or my problem. What a bunch of losers and really, lazy people. I finally did get a lady from Sprint who worked in Utah and not only spoke English but was very helpful and who solved the problem with, apparently, their computer program. All in all, when my son’s contract is up, both he and my wife and I will be going to a new company, certainly NOT Sprint.
Customer service-wise, I actually like Sprint. At least in that the people are nice, even if they do seem powerless to fix things at times. For instance, this week I had my address changed for where I wanted my billing statements to go to. Somehow, my phone number was changed during the process, something I was not informed of. It took a trip to a Sprint store where the manager spent a while on the phone with Sprint to figure out the problem: the changed number, since I was obviously unable to receive calls or text messaging. And logging onto Sprint’s website was obviously out as well since I had no clue what my true phone number was.
Ugh, Sprint.
“Forsee, now the president of the University of Missouri, declined to comment for this story.”
The head honcho who threw customer satisfaction under the bus is now a university president? That’s… kind of a bummer.
He should do great as UM president. When I was there, administrators routinely toadied to the state legislature, overpaid incompetent administrators and faculty members, left most of the real teaching up to exploited and inexperienced grad students, and ultimately failed the students it allegedly served.
Just change the pronouns to, say, stockholders, executives, CSRs, and customers, and you’ve got Sprint. It’s a natural match for my old school!
why in the world would sprint not care about their customer service? what kind of idiot ceo do they have?
All cell phone companies are awful. That said, I am a very happy 8 year customer of Sprint. Just last week I was given a plan by their retention specialist (who was helping me change the people in my family plan) that is 3 lines, nights at 7 (which I was paying $5 for with my old plan), no roaming charges (which my old plan didn’t have), 1000 minutes (my old plan was 800), all for $50! Better yet, I DIDN’T SIGN A NEW CONTRACT!
I’ve been in the Sprint store twice in the last month for problems with my phone (it’s old). Both times it was fixed for free in a timely manner and the people were so nice. I’m certainly sticking with Sprint.
Yeah, Sprint customer service is awful. When my wife and I were getting married two years ago and wanted to move our phones off of our respective parents’ plans and on to a new one we spent weeks trying to get them to do it, getting new conflicting instructions every time we spoke to somebody. Finally my wife was on the verge of tears in their store, just begging the manager to please give us clear instructions on what to do when the manager threatened to call the cops on us for complaining and making a scene (we hadn’t even raised our voices). We then moved our numbers to Verizon. That took us one 15 minute visit to their store and 10 of that was spent looking at phones. Much easier.
I second the point that while their network was good, the service was absolutely terrible and incompetent. Verizon never threatens to call the police when we ask a simple question – I like that a lot.
Sprint bait-and-switched me about 8 days before everything changed, but that’s a story for another time. (Yes, they actually tried to use 9/11 as an excuse when I called to cancel.) So I went Nextel, because my earlier Cingular (via Nokia) connectivity had been so bad. I wasn’t pleased to hear about the merger.
But since then, Sprint’s been good to me. On one call, some tech-ish person I talked to knocked $10 off my monthly bill just because she saw an available discount on my internet connectivity. If customer service went from “a priority at Nextel to an afterthought at Sprint,” that may tell us that they’re still maintaining separate call pools for at least some customers.
@kingdom2000: Hear, hear!
“The CSRs were rigidly timed and judged only on how short their calls were…Even bathroom breaks were monitored,”
The IRS micro-manages their Customer Service employees EXACTLY like this, and they have even taken the step of having managers follow employees to the bathroom and stand outside the stall and listen in to make sure that the employee is actually using the toilet rather than just taking a mini-break by pretending that they have to use the bathroom.
The next time you call the IRS for tax help and get a crappy, unhelpful IRS Customer Service employee, they probably just got back from their bathroom break…
Sprint is like an abusive boyfriend. They tell you they’ll change, and do nice things for you to stay, then they beat you up again! Sprint was great in the early years, but my god you don’t want to have an issue with billing or anything, because their reps mock you. I had a guy laugh at me with my increasing anger. Eventually I had to bring the BBB in because I repeatedly told the rep to end my account and he talked over me instead of ending it. BBB had the $200 fee abolished thankfully, but I’ve never had a cell phone company make me cry and laugh in my face before. They need to fold already.
Ever since my first Sprint bill, I’ve had to call customer service up to have them remove the data charge from my bill, a charge that they say is coming from phones that have the Internet and other data disabled. It’s generally only about $3 each time, but regardless, it’s very annoying.
This is something suddenly comming to light? In 2000 I worked for Sprint local, then Sprint PCS as a Customer Rep or whatever the peons were called back then. We were regularly pushed to increase call volume and efficiency. I was once put on notice for having a 97% rating, they wanted a 98% or better. The straw that broke the back was being called out in a group meeting for taking a loo break a few too many times during a shift. When you gotta go, you gotta go.
It sucks a local company to me is going down in flames, but they have been on the decline for a long time.
I used to work for Sprint, and I had a Sprint (Hybrid) phone. I went to change my plan with Sprint one day, I use a Hybrid phone. When I finally got ahold of a service rep, he, barely speaking english, informed me that the current plan I had (PP900) was the ONLY plan I was able to get on that phone. Stunned, I said, so every one of my friends that have the Hybrids, have this plan? And he said “Yes, that is correct.” I said, thats funny, because I previously changed my plan FROM PP450 to PP900. He then said “No sir, your phone uses a SIM card, and that is the only plan you can have…”
I now work for T-Mobile. No wonder 800,000 subscribers LEFT Sprint in the 4th Quarter of 2007 alone.
@shadow735: First of all, you’ve been flagged. Your comment is inappropriate to begin with.
Second, you forgot a category.
4: Have few or no problems to begin with, have their discounts properly credited from day one, and have little issue getting the few minor problems that occur resolved. Also, get great reception (paying for a reasonable phone, and not taking the POS freebie, plays a part in this – EVERY phone receives differently, and the cheap toss-aways are the worst), and always have. Everywhere they ever go and the entire path between those places, which cover more than half the country. The only exceptions being inside structures that interfere with signals in general.
In late ’07, my girlfriend had her contract extended after she called to terminate one of her lines. They initially refused to cancel the extension, but she didn’t back down. They finally admitted that the line used to extend the contract (the one that had been inactive for 6 months), could not possibly have ordered the extension. After that they also rebated the charge to change plans.
@shadow735: I agree with you Shadow. I have not had any problems with Verizonwireless compared to the constant nightmares with Sprint. I do not regret switched back to Verizonwireless after Sprint has given me nothing but grief and the customer service went downhill really quickly.
What Dan Hesse said was true about Sprint. I worked under Forsee, who said less than two years ago (I paraphrase) that Sprint AS A COMPANY decided NOT to compete on customer service or price, but only on “superior products and services.”
Hesse and Sprint are now competing on customer service AND price. and you may not see it right away, but if Sprint can hold off being taken over, Sprint’s gonna be one of the biggest turnaround stories of 2009. In 2010, Hesse will be on a lot of “best CEO” lists.
I requested to add a 3rd phone for infrequent use. After promises to the contrary I found this phone was costing me $80 per month (new plan/new contract). In addition, over a period of several months, more services were added to the line costing me $15 or so more per month. Many Many calls, hang ups, waiting, inadequate service reps, they refused to reverse the charges fraudulently added to my account.
After several years with Sprint, I told them I had to cancel, because they could not promise no unauthorizes changes to my account in the future. Then I found out they were trying to get me to pay an early termination fee on the phone they overcharged me for by upwards of $1000 in about a year service. They had promised this would not change my contract when ordering the phone.
I spent many calls over 3 months in early 2008 to reolve this with Customer Retntion. They promised on 2 ocassions to zero my account and let me go, each call took over an hour to make. Yet, there apparently was no note in the system when the bills started coming and I attempted to escalate to management. I was hung up on and ignored. Then they sent the bill to collections. I cannot in good conscious pay them more money when the reason I had to leave them was because of blithe disregard for law and ethical behavior in the mgmt of my account.