We’ve all experienced a challenging customer. You know the kind – no matter what you do you just can’t seem to please them.
What do you do with those difficult folks? How do you handle it?
Well if you are Sprint-Nextel you cut those chronically dissatisfied people loose.
Check out this headline:
Sprint Cuts 1000+ Customers For Excessive Complaining
From the article:
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.
In a statement, the company said: “Rather than continue to operate in a situation that was unsatisfactory for Sprint and our subscribers, we chose to terminate our relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options.”
What do you think?
Is Sprint right to pass their difficult clients on to another provider? Or is there a better alternative?
I can certainly understand why they would dump them. I’ve had to dump clients because they were extremely difficult and were sucking too much of my time. Seems you’d want to be VERY careful to make sure your current (and future) customers got the message that they were valued and that they should feel free to call customer service with any and all problems. If people got the feeling that they might get booted if they called customer service, they might not want to choose you in the first place.
Randa, You’re right. It is a very delicate balance. I’m not sure there is one “right” answer to this issue.
A friend of mine was recently fired by his bank. He showed up one day to cash a cheque and they handed him one instead. Gave him back all his money and closed his accounts. Not even a golden handshake.
I’ve been fired by Dr.’s for just asking questions. Arrogance knows no bounds. Long time no see Chris.
Cheers!
…BB
Heya Bloke! Good to see you up and about again.
I agree that dissing customers doesn’t make much sense.
What about a business casting off customers that cost them money? Does that kind of an approach perhaps help keep costs down for their other customers?
Or is it just dumb?
It is most definitely DUMB. Not only from a financial standpoint, but from a Public Relations one as well. When I hear of nonsense like this they have certainly lost me as customer — present, future or otherwise.
Many businesses start out by taking any work they can get. As they get larger, they find themselves getting better quality customers. Often half your resource is spent on 10% of your customers.
This will cripple any business, especially a business offering a service for a flat rate.
I think they did the right thing – a small handful of customers using all the resources means that the rest of the customers get average or bad service because there are no staff available.
Basically, if someone needs 40-50 support calls per month, they should be with a provider that is geared up for that and be paying a premium for it. Sounds harsh but I don’t see how you can afford to keep customers like that. If any of my customers called me 40-50 times per month (and the average was once per month), I’d fire them too. Clearly the business relationship is not a good match for either party, so move on.
Blog Bloke – how can it be a dumb move financially? I’d say the cost of fielding 40-50 support calls was far more than the customer would be paying per month. From a PR point of view, I totally agree, this could backfire.
I’m with you Bloke that a move like that can make for PR problems.
But Harvey brings up a good point. In spite of the bad PR it may be a good business move if it frees up resources to allow the business to better serve their remaining customers.
For example in the Sprint case, what if removing those 1200 or so customers from their customer base meant that everyone else had a significantly shorter wait time when they called in for customer support? That would be a huge benefit for their customer base and for the business, wouldn’t it?
Hey all,
They has to be other ways to deal with this than just issuing a press release that you are dumping 1200 customers. How about a premium for more than 10 calls per month? That might cause nuisance customers to go somewhere else, but it would be their choice. A totally different PR issue.
Dave, I agree there are probably much better options for companies. Sometimes I wonder how thoroughly corporate execs think through options.
Well, I don’t think I will do that, yet. Customers are always right