Sprint is hemorrhaging both money and customers as it searches for a way to stop the financial bleeding. The company lost $505 million in the first quarter alone, and watched helplessly as over a million of its customers defected to other wireless carriers.
“As expected, our wireless business delivered weak financial results,” Sprint Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse said. “While the business will continue to face challenges in the short term, we are making progress in methodically attacking the sources of our performance issues.”
The Kansas City Business Journal says that of the 1.09 million departing customers, 1.07 of them were traditional “post-paid” accounts and 543,000 were prepaid users.
Ouch.
Sprint claims to be revamping its notoriously broken customer service, but is it too little too late?
Sprint Nextel loses $505M on lower revenue [Bizjournals]
(Photo: meghannmarco )
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my sprint SERO plan is amazing, got the smartphone that runs software I need it to run as opposed to a fancypants one that doesnt (take that iphone! lol)..and overall customer service has been great..i once had a CSR tell me that the way that I was using my unlmited data as a modem for my laptop was too obvious, and went through step by step how to make it seam less obvious!
@MoCo:
I doubt that because they’d probably have “great metrics” if you did that.
@dtmoore: Ditto. $30 bux for 500mins, free txt, unl web/email, free nights and weekends. I just can’t leave that behind. I actually hope they stay in business.
@dorianh49:
I went through the exact same process. My entire family is on AT&T, so I wanted to switch. I took my Sprint bill to AT&T, asked them to simply match what I had with Sprint, and AT&T said they couldn’t get even halfway.
I simply assume that I’m going to get crappy customer service regardless the carrier and stick with the cheapest service. Sprint has yet to disappoint.
Maybe the Ceo will be out of a job soon. Too bad….
It is just not Sprint service that is broken, but the way they treat their employees. During my one year tenure, I broke my wrist after a nasty fall trying to patch a leaky roof, only to lay there for an hour until a customer offered to drive me to the hospital. The reason why our employees did not want to drive me to the hospital… The store manager told them to worry about the phones first, then the computers.
@CubFan81:
I have to say that’ll I’ll be doing the same. I’ve used three different
lines of communication to get something done about not being able to get a
signal in our house (hardly makes sense to have a wireless phone and you
have to go out into the street to use it). Nothing has been done. Just
counting down the days to when I can switch to another long painful
contract.
I’ve never had any problems with Sprint here in Richmond, VA. It’s coverage rivals Verizon, prices easily win, and their three Simply Everything levels make it easy to own a Blackberry. In fact, since I started my plan I’ve never purchased a phone from Sprint with rebates. I had a Samsung A920 and now have a BB 8830 and want the curve when it arrives. I had visited a store and they said since I changed my plan in September they couldn’t help out but to dial *2 and they should be able to do something. So I called up, explained my situation and got the phone with all but the $100 new subscriber rebate. Even in March when I changed to my Simply everything plan it only took 5 minutes, and this call with hold time took 12.
Heh. Sprint doesn’t care about it’s customers or anything of the sort. As an NPC agent (Number porting), I’m responsible for calling customers to let them know if something is wrong with their porting request. Plenty of times, I’ve read in the notes that the customer has requested not to be called. Well when monthly report comes in, my supervisor can’t understand why my “worked cases” are higher than my “calls made”.
I told him that plenty of times, the customer has requested that we don’t call them back until they get the information/their phone. And since we’re supposed to call every 2 hours, you can see how annoying that will get.
The exchange went something like this.
Supervisor: You should be calling for EVERY case. Every one.
Me: But they said they didn’t want to be called.
Sup: Did they give you a time frame.
Me: They said they’d call us first.
Sup: Well, unless they give you a specific time frame, you should call them. Tell them that unless they give us the info, we’ll keep calling them
Me:Hmm…What about if they haven’t gotten their phone because they just ordered them today?
Sup: You should still call them.
Me: Wouldn’t that just succeed in making them mad though?
Sup: Well Sprint pays you to make the calls, so you should make them.
There you have it. We’re expected to harass the customer until they provide us with the info or whatnot, even if they tell us not to call, just to make our numbers look good. How’s that for customer service hmm?
They are about to loose me. I have had the worst customer service. I had a girl text messaging while authorizing a check payment (not the first time, mostly happens with men). I have had one sided conversations where grumbles were all I got in return to my please and thank you’s for making payments. Not to mention the countless times my bill has been screwed up.
I cant wait until november so I can stop paying these bastards and move on to tmobile or some other GSM carrier.
I will never go back to sprint, I will never suggest anyone to use sprint, and when my contract is up Im going to smash my phone on the sidewalk outside the sprint store (sarcasm on the last bit).
I am proud to be one of those 1.09 million
The thing is, Sprint’s coverage is really good where I live – better than some of the competitors. So I went with an MVNO that uses Sprint’s network. I still get the same coverage, but I never have to deal with Sprint’s billing or customer service again.
Coming out of Lurk Mode to express my extreme happiness at this stat – I’m one of those 1.09M to leave Sprint. I bought an iPhone a little while ago, unlocked it, put it on T-Mobile. Never been happier with a phone/carrier and I’ve had Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile over the past 8 or 9 years. Here’s hoping for Sprint to keep marching down the road to ruin!
@CubFan81: I hear the reasoning for that is they pay for storage space on networks for texts and other data. I call BS on that, you know how much 1 text is? Fractions of a kb!
My Sprint gets better coverage in Houston than most of my friend’s phones (on other carriers)… It used to be outrageously expensive but I just switched to the $99 for unlimited everything and couldn’t be happier. All my info is online, I pay online, etc etc. I’ve really never had a bad customer service issue…
Maybe I am living in an alternate universe! That’s OK, it’s pretty nice here.
@sohmc: omg. plz no. tmobile is infinitely worse than Sprint. rather go without any cell at all then go with those thieving incompetent lying rat bastards.
Friend of mine has Sprint and swears by them. Never has a problem with his bill or his phone. And for the most part he doesn’t sound like he’s talking through a tin can.
On the other hand, I’ve had Verizon for several years. I wasn’t a fan of Verizon back when my father got them – I was a Cingular employee in the corporate office – but he had a decent enough plan and only used the phone when he needed it.
After parting ways with Cingular and trying other carriers and options, I finally went with Verizon. I’ve had no problems with them so far, other than a handset issue that was more a manufacturer problem than anything. Damn phone never worked when I needed it. [By the way, it was a Samsung SCH-U540]
payback’s a bitch, ain’t it, sprint!
HA! next time maybe you’ll pay attention to what your customers have to say…
Mr_Human at 04:43 PM
“@dtmoore: Ditto. $30 bux for 500mins, free txt, unl web/email, free nights and weekends.”
Same here. I’ve never had a contract, or a dropped call, in six years with Sprint. I buy last generation handsets on ebay for almost nothing vs orig cost. Happy so far.
Wondering who might want to buy sprint? Comcast does. Comcast tried their luck with a joint venture with sprint in the pivot product. And Sprint , intel and comcast are all in cohoots working on wimax.
Seems like everytime I’m up for renewal and check prices on plans and phones from pretty much every carrier Sprint always comes out to be pretty expensive when you take into account phone and plans together. It seems they really only have concentrated on the business market, leaving the consumer market to everyone else.
Sprint’s teaming up with Clearwire for some WiMax shenanigans, or at least trying to. I hope not. I get my internet through Clearwire and hate to think what Sprint’s influence might have on the company.
I am retired and one of my three military kids has Sprint. Lord, what a joke when it comes to customer service. Rude, non-english speaking, total arse@#@. It was like talking to you shoe. One answer from one dingbat, a different one from another. Local store personnel who basically told me to go to hell, they were busy trying to sell phones and services; and just plain frustration. I hope they go bankrupt, I am so pissed at them. And, funny thing, when my son signed with them, I thought their product was great for three months. But then—
I worked as a CS/Sales Rep in an EDS call center in a small central PA town. Get this: Every CS rep handled both Sprint AND AT&T calls. The dirty: We were to do our best to keep people from canceling. This included allowing them to “cancel” but only after having them swap from one provider to the other. Both companies took a percentage of each “sale” in this manner (70-30, with the company switched to getting the 70). If they wanted to not use either one, we promised them a rate cut of 5 cents per minute (this was back in the days of 25 cent per minute calls), so they paid only 20 cents per minute during peak hours. We also waived various “fees” for providing this service for them. This often was enough to keep the people enrolled. We constantly had to upsell cell service, internet services, etc.
It made me feel so dirty, I only stayed for two weeks. I just stopped going. I really felt what went on in there passed very far into that gray-black area of ethics that I try not to go into. But when I first took the job, it was because the starting pay was far above what was normally offered in the area. Oh, and hang-ups are SOP if they feel they can’t get what they want out of you. They just have to hit a key on their keyboard and the auto-dialers and whatnot will kick you right off and route in a new caller. Oh, and if you asked to be taken off the calling list? Guess what. We just put you on the list for the other divisions and the other company.
When you call customer service for either company (Sprint or AT&T), don’t just blindly assume that the reps you are speaking with are actually employed for either one, if they are US-based. They could be a temp working for BOTH due to their contract with companies like EDS.
P.S. – EDS sucks. Worst employer ever. Downright evil to their low-level employees. I am surprised they didn’t make it to the worst companies in the USA competition. Those bungholes were so evil, they disabled the drinking fountains between break times.
I only have experience with TracFone (over US Cellular towers), AT&T and VerizonWireless. I’m ok with what I have used, no complaints.
When I shopped for new service and related phone, Sprin-tel was atrocious: a BASIC, klunker looking, featureless phone was $65 at Sprin-tel when a better phone was free elsewhere; also, my area has relatively poor coverage. Then, add in the idea that I’d be unable to transport the phone to a new carrier – that was also a bit tough to swallow. iDEN? I-dunno.
I guess the availability to get push-to-talk on other carriers was all it took to open the floodgates.
I work for a competitor to Sprint and the buzz was all about them offering the “all you can eat” plan to stave off disaster. They did it, and the competition followed. I guess it wasn’t the silver bullet they hoped it would be.
Count 4 more phones leaving Sprint. I’ve been a customer for 11 years and have had enough. Not only does the customer service suck, the calling plans are terrible. Once the 3G JesusPhone is released in June, my wife and I will grab one (and hope the rumors of a $200 AT&T subsidy is true) and pick up a couple of other phones for the kids.
Not all call centers are outsourced, but a great many are, including departments that really shouldn’t be.
In my experience, Sprint had a huge “sales are king” attitude. It was all about making sales. No providing service or helping customers, just making sales, no matter what.
Ouch, Sprint, I am one of the few happy customers, who would swear by your service. Thanks, and hope you get this turned around!
If it’s not Sprint and their crap customer service it’s AT&T and their billing shenanigans, or Verizon and their premium text crap or T-Mobile and their abysmal coverage. Haven’t heard anything bad about Virgin but their phones are all crappy, and apparently Helio’s got customer service as bad as Sprint’s. Moving to LA in June, where does that leave me?
Ok… just opened my sprint bill this morning, and just who can tell me why this part of the bill is funny….
Fair and Flex Family Plan 550
Anytime Minutes Included $0.00
America Roaming Included $0.00
2 Way SMS Blocking – CDMA SOC 2 Way SMS Blocking $0.00
Unlimited Nights&Weekends-7pm $0.00
1 SMS Text Messages @ $ 20/msg $0.20
…which is just yet another reason to leave sprint as soon as my contract is up…
I’ve had a cell phone with Sprint and never had to talk with customer service. The phone I got a couple years ago was really crappy (Samsung’s fault), so my local Sprint store keeps replacing it when it fails without hassle. I also get a 25% discount because I work for UT. It’s just peachy for me.
@me and the sysop: I’ve had it for seven years I meant to say.
Another funny note is that Sprint just opened the new “Sprint Center” Arena in downtown Kansas City. They didn’t put up any signs that bear the Sprint logo, though.
AT&T, however made sure to put a giant lighted sign on their downtown building, that looms right over the new arena…
Apparently Dan Hesse’s “Pretty awesome, huh?” message in those $99.99-for-everything commercials isn’t sticking — has anyone emailed dan@spring.com to alert him about this?
Oh, wait — I’ll save you the trouble (note the curiously noncommittal customer assurance that begins paragraph two):
“Thank you for taking the time to write to me. There are a lot of exciting changes going on here at Sprint. To really revolutionize wireless as we know it, we need your input. It’s so important that we hear from the people out there who are using our phones every day so we can provide the best service.
“I would like to take the time to read your email carefully and respond. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to check out the details of our new Simply Everything plan at http://www.sprint.com/everything. A representative from my office will be contacting you in about a week.
“Thanks again,
Dan Hesse
CEO Sprint”
dan@sprint.com, I know…
My fiance has to call Sprint every time she gets a bill to have it fixed, their CS is really, really abysmal, Im not surprised. When her contract is up she plans to jump that sinking ship, looks like their other customers are doing the same.
Just waiting for June to jump ship, too, now that our employer discount is gone.
Their CSRs – some were nice, but they kept extending our contract without our knowing it, then claiming they told us about it.
Verizon is just way overpriced.
Happy Sprint user here.
Now lets just get some new Phones.
I’ve been with Sprint for about four years, and I never had a problem until recently. This past December 24, my old cellphone broke. I was going out of town for an extended period starting Christmas day, and I needed a phone. I was eligible for a new phone anyway, so I bought a nice phone with the understanding I would get a $50 rebate. I checked the rebate status online a couple of weeks after sending it in and read that I wasn’t getting it because I’d not done everything properly to get the rebate. I wrote to Sprint to see what the problem was. When I didn’t hear from them within 72 hours (that’s the amount of time they have to answer, according to their auto-reply), I emailed them again, letting them know it had been 144+ hours since I’d received the auto-reply, and I was upset. I told them I did everything required to get the rebate (I’m an old hand – been at it for 30+ years), and if they didn’t send it I’d cancel my service as soon as I had a valid reason, as would my friends and family. I think the clincher, though, was when I said I’d notify consumerist.com. I received an email one day after the auto-reply to that one, stating that my rebate was bypassing the normal route and the check was being expidited. Hooray for consumerist.com!
I actulay like my nextel phone before it became sprint
Let me tell you a little story, I once worked for a company in a retail store that had the avg reps stay at 3-4yrs on avg..
Things were great no charge backs ect… Then came along a guy who theology was to break the bank. As Store Manager he allowed Reps to start making 70-100K a year, but to make that money alone, from store traffic you have to start opening accounts at will and add what you like when you like.. All to his Approval..
I objected to this method and was cast as an outsider even after my years of tenture there..
I like most have a family and didn’t want to make waves. I vote with my feet.. But I can tell you this I have seen Abusive and prbly Criminal Activity at this one store.
Its not hard to see, corporate security must be a joke in that company. It goes unpunished, or there waiting for the big one CNN or something about this crapolah.
Now I will give them some credit they removed while I was there 1 person for doing transactions while no customers at his station but hey he made over 150K in his short stay of 1.4yrs.. 1 guy made that much about in 9months there in that retail store.
All off of screwing The American Public, it take some real balls to open accounts all day and add stuff and make 30% off your bill’s customers pay.
999999999 for Social Security number, $125 deposit.. Cancel your old line churn to the high heavens. Or 0000000000 TAX ID Number a few times gets someone a 50 line no deposit account. They took the phones and sold them for $50 each in town.. Store Manger shrugs and says I didn’t see anything like this.
Top it off they give them a boeing discount you know 25% off plan and bill for kicks in the store managers name b/c like I said he benifits from it and is in on it.
Now this is where it gets even more funny for that company these people give him a trip to Hawaii this year.
He didn’t earn it the people above him gave him the alternate spot alrdy. Talk about an organization that doesn’t have a clue on even whats going on.
Glad to be gone, belive me when I tell you the people who left arent all nextel 100′s are b/c of this one store for sure. Now a protge is doing this across town of his..
Follow the money Get a Clue people.
I worked for Nextel for several years and had respect and passion for that company. I know the technology was on it’s way out and we needed to move to CDMA by building a network or having someone like Sprint merge with us. Well….maybe Sprint has the right network for the future but how bad can you screw up a merger??? Why would you not keep some systems/programs in place that Nextel was successful with?? Sprint Management….arrogant idiots that have no idea what they are doing and really know how to f things up.
If any of my Nextel brothers and sisters are reading this, they know exactly what I’m talking about. No surprise how many cutomers they have lost!!
weird. sprint is the ONLY carrier I’ve never had issues with.