If you were to review Sprints latest earnings you would have garnered that they lost another 1.3 million customers. Yes that's million; people are fleeing Sprint like the plague.
How did get Sprint get to this point? You would think that it may be based on poor coverage, slow data, or bad customer service. It's clearly not coverage or data speeds as they consistently rank high for those two marks. The truth is, is that Sprint dug itself into a whole so deep that customers exploited the system.
Anyone who is or was a customer learned quickly that if you call up and say you're going to drop your service that you could essentially get away with cell phone murder. As a pervious user I was able to snag data for at 50% off its retail price while adding an extra 100 minutes to my plan. Does that make me a bad person, I didn't think so but then again it is how you get there is the problem.
Sprint is known to have horrendous customer service. Despite the few that have no problems, anyone having to deal with billing knew you couldn't count on anything. Reports of overbilling, wrong plans, outrageous overages that should have been covered by their plan and the list goes on and on. It's no secret that customer service is disastrous.
The entire problem started when sprint opened its retention department. A quick surf of the web will tell you that if you call a customer service rep and you don't get the services you want for free, simply, hang up and try again. It's this simple hang up and try again factor that really screwed the Sprint pooch. Due to poor training the results you got from Sprint ranged from freebies to nothing at all, it depended on the customer service rep.
As Sprint has tried to slow the bleeding they are essentially running away the customers who stayed for the freebies. Sprint has been cracking down on its free add-ons which are a direct result of the massive declines in Sprint's user base. Why stay with a shoddy company when Verizon and AT&T have much better customer service and reputation.
Sprint has a long and tough road to earn back the public's reputation. They are attempting to flood the airways to help increase a user base but until the fundamentals are fixed they won't see any change. You can't make the declaration either that its Sprints phone selection that's driving customers to the other providers. For a long part of the early 2000's Sprint and Verizon had very similar phone lineups and in terms of RIM, they are the same. This was impart due to them both being on CDMA technology where the markets were not that large for cell phone manufactures. Regardless of phone choice Verizon has been growing by leaps over Sprint.
How can Sprint help themselves? Firstly a revamp of customer service rep training is required. If all of your service reps can't give the same answer then your training is failing. One customer should be able to get a response to any question consistently from any rep. Start with that basic idea and don't make your company looks desperate by bending at the knees and giving away service for free.
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