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Great Moments In Customer Service: Sprint Cans 1,200 Subscribers For Complaining

Do you ever feel like your wireless carrier just doesn't care about you? Well, get a load of this. Sprint this week said it plans to cut off 1,200 subscribers for making too many calls to customer service. What is the real problem here? That these customers were making too many calls? Or that Sprint cared more about the bottom line than providing quality service?

Here is a look at this sterling example of customer care:

A Sprint representative said the average customer calls customer service less than once a month, but the 1,200 clients getting the boot call 40-50 times as often.

Sprint said whatever the complaint, it has worked to resolve it but due to the volume of calls it's obvious customers involved are not happy.

So Sprint has decided to call it quits and terminate these people from their contracts rather than try to work things out.

Now, I realize that some of these customers were probably high maintenance and could never be satisfied, no matter what. But I am willing to bet that a good portion of them actually had real problems that Sprint simple didn't work hard enough to solve. And that's sad.

It seems that a growing number of businesses today are more interested in a quick buck than in doing the heavy lifting needed to build real, long term relationships with their customers. Again, I realize some of these people were probably perpetual complainers that had to be let go. But how many of these subscribers were simply victims of poor network coverage? How many of them were trapped with faulty phones that they couldn't upgrade? And who deserves our pity? The last time I checked, the customer was king.

What do you think? Do you think Sprint was right to cut these subscribers off? Or is this just another example of the decline in customer care among larger companies?

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