Sprint Terminates Problem Users, Faces Complaints
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Richard Baguley Published on July 12, 2007 Comment on this |
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12th July 2007 - Sprint has terminated the accounts of over a thousand customers that it claims were making excessive use of their customer service lines, but some of the users are fighting back. The company sent a letter to between 1000 and 1200 customers informing them that their service was being terminated as of the 30th of July because of the excessive calling, but many users are claiming that they have been unfairly penalized.In a statement from Sprint, the company claims that some of the terminated users had called the customer care line hundreds of times a month, continuing to call even after their issues had been resolved. "In a recent review of Sprint's customers' accounts, over the past year a small number of our customers - 1000-1200 - have made frequent calls regarding account information which we have been unable to resolve to their satisfaction, despite our best efforts" says the statement in part. "These individuals are calling Care - in some cases - hundreds of times a month, for a period of 6-12 months on the same issues even after the issues appear to have been resolved. " Sprint Spokeperson Roni Singleton told us that Sprint had "determined that we had resolved the issues, but that we would be unable to satisfy the customers needs."
One former Sprint employee who claims to have worked in the customer retention department went even further; he told wirelessinfo.com that he dealt with one account "where the guy hadn't paid his bill in over a year...I actually had to deal with a lot of these problem accounts and the ones I specifically mentioned were committing serious fraud against the company". The anonymous former employee also claimed that the problem had been exacerbated by managers of the retention department who had allowed this to continue because they got commissions for retaining customers. "Reps and managers would continually allow these problem customers to receive credits, phones and discounts that they were not due in order to keep the customer and thereby make these commissions."
However, some of these users who had their accounts canceled dispute Sprint's version of events. One customer we contacted told us that his account was terminated less than 30 days after he set it up, because, he thinks, he made a number of calls in connection with porting his number to Sprint. The user (who wanted to remain anonymous) told us that Sprint is "creating people with enormously high call volumes And trust us, we don't enjoy calling them to get our billing errors (and the like) fixed; just as much as they hate us annoying them." This user also felt that Sprint themselves created this problem; they often told him to call back or transferred him to another department, which, he thinks, would count as a new call to their customer care line. After contacting Sprint, he has been reinstated, but remains angry at the way he has been treated. "This is an okay policy, but it needs to be implemented correctly; and the system fixed before they enforce it. They should send out warning letters first, before a full fledged termination; to allow the customer a chance to correct their actions." Sprint spokesperson Roni Singleton told us that it was "not the number of calls; it's the combination of the excessive calling and the length of time that the calls took."
This user also claimed that several other users had been reinstated by Sprint when they complained, and Singleton confirmed that some accounts had been reinstated after customers had called a special freephone number that Sprint set up that was listed on the letter. However, she was not able to provide figures for how many accounts had been reinstated, or what the criteria were for this reinstatement.
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