How's this for customer service?

Here's a new low in customer service...

Brandweek reports that Sprint Nextel has cut loose about 1,000 customers who the phone company says complain too much.

The customers received letters saying, "While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability … the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement…"  Talk about dropped calls!

Sprint claims these habitual complainers were clogging customer service lines with their frequent calls.  One of the dropped customers, according to an ABC News story, said "Customer service is there in the first place to help customers with issues. If we can't call customer service, what do we do?"

Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton told ABC NEWS, "In this case we're terminating the relationship with customers that had problems that we continually tried to resolve."

While I don't argue that some of these customers may have been real pains in the cellular ass, most of us can probably relate to the frustration of dealing with phone company customer service -- lengthy waits to get to a real person, explaining the problem, re-explaining it to a supervisor when the first customer service rep can't give you a satisfactory response, and finally hanging up thinking your problem has been resolved, only to find it is still there.

One complaining customer said she called repeatedly because of a billing error that service reps said would be corrected, only to find it still there on the bill the next month, and then again the next month, etc. etc.

I had problems of my own almost two years ago when Verizon screwed up my phones when I moved my offices.  After being without phones for a few days, and then having callers receive an intercept saying my number was  disconnected, I received a gigantic bill that knocked me off my chair.  They said it was for extra service calls to my premises to fix the problem -- a problem their own installers had created in the first place.  After many calls including, and finally a threat to go to the Public Service Commission, I got to a "special assistant to the president" who said she'd look into the problem and let me know.  I held off paying the obscene bill until I heard back from her, which was nearly two weeks later.

The same day I got an answer from Ms. Special Assistant, I also got a turn-off notice, dated the same day my bill was due.  Ms. Assistant had been able to  lower my bill considerably, and I paid it.  But then I started getting dunning notices from a collection agency for the full original amount.  After showing them cancelled checks to prove I had paid the bill, I thought all was ok.  Months later I heard from yet another collection agency, and it started all over again.  I finally got them off my back (I hope) after paying around $50 they said I still owed, which I paid just to shut them up.

So having gone through phone company customer service hell, I can understand how a reasonable person could legitimately call customer service dozens of times in a month.  Does that make him a whiner or just someone standing up for his rights as a paying customer?

So although Sprint Nextel is now rid of a thousand whiners, they may have a bit of a public relations mess on their hands.  For starters, negative stories in Brandweek, ABC News and now my 2 cents. 

I find it hard to feel sorry for them. 

 

Comments

[Cam Beck]

Hear! Hear!

"Customer Service" for these types of companies are usually anything but.

[David Reich]

Cam, I would think excellent customer service could be a selling point, where all the cellular providers offer pretty much the same thing now. When will they get it?

[Lewis Green]

Well ain't that a kick in the pants. Apparently, customer service is only there for customers who don't really need them. Man, this story makes me dizzy. Stop the world, I need to get off.

[David Reich]

Maybe Sprint Nextel's ad slogan should be "We don't drop calls, only customers." Unreal!

[Valeria Maltoni]

David:

Doug has a pretty good post on the Sprint issue here http://nextup.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/sprint-fires-its-customers/

I've just become a customer of Comcast cable and they cannot even spell my name right -- Zalley, according to them. How do you go from a spelled Valeria to Zalley is a mystery. That is also customer service. I talked to at least three reps before the service was installed. I sent my business card in stapled to my payment slip. Crossing fingers, I really would not want to call anyone.

[David Reich]

Thanks for the comment and the tip to Doug's post, Zalley.

[Katie Konrath]

Wow, your experience sounds like a horrible mess. I find it so hard to believe that cell phone service companies can treat their customers so poorly and still stay in business, but the reality is that they don't have to be good to their customers: once we sign the service agreement, we're stuck for the next two years!

What a mess.

[David Reich]

I think there's no excuse for these giant companies to provide such poor customer service.