July 6th, 2007
More Sprint outrages: phone, store employees told to shoo away cancelled account appeals
From a post on SprintUsers.com, citing an internal memo said to be for Sprint phone customer service types who are faced with overly frequent (90 or above in last six months) callers to customer service who have been notified of cancellation and are calling to appeal:
Employee Actions Include:
1. Do not engage the customer in non-Sprint related conversation - simply confirm the information that the customer was sent
2. Do not attempt to save these customers
3. Do not transfer these customers to Account Services (Retention) to be saved
4. Do not reactivate the cancelled accounts for the customers
5. Do not establish a new account for these customers
Inform the customer to call the specific toll-free number that was given in the letter and attempt to end the call as quickly as possible. If during normal business hours, cold transfer the customer to the number immediately (877-527-8405).
Wait there’s more. According to this post by Godmera, retail store employees are instructed to put the hammer down when ticked off customers come in and rant:
I’m a Sprint rep at a retail store, it’s bad enough that we get yelled at by customers when customer care screws up now will get yelled at for getting the customers account cancel. When we called up to help fix the customers problem (which the customer attempts to fix by calling customer care before hand and getting transfered many times) we get transfered another 5 times before someone fixes the problem.
Hey Sprint, no wonder why you lost 220,000 customers last quarter with 2.7% churn.
So, for setting this oh-so-nurturing customer service climate, why does SprintNextel CEO Gary Forsee still have a job?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
