Eric Wise

Business & .NET

Kudos to Sprint

I noticed an article today about Sprint Firing 1000 Customers. I would like to congratulate Sprint for making a tough and potentially unpopular decision for the good of their business. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about firing clients and I believe much of the same logic applies to the Sprint decision. Naturally for a company to survive in a competitive environment it must service its customers at a reasonable level. But at what point should a business decide that some customers simply aren't worth servicing? I recall the CEO of Best Buy echoing similar views in a "controversial" interview where he spoke about Best Buy seeking high margin customers (don't have a lot of returns, use company credit, etc). This just makes good business sense to me.

Businesses are in business to make money, and part of making money is providing good service to your customers. But frankly, there are customers out there who are never happy with their service, will always call you and question every line item of their bill, and try to complain and finaggle and fraud there way into any discount they possibly can. Sitting next to the customer service department in our company, I overhear some conversations with customers that are mean, abusive, and outright assholes and frankly I'm glad to see companies showing these customers the door.

Published Jul 09 2007, 05:48 PM by Eric Wise

Filed under: Business / IT

Comments

Neal said:

Haven't been following this too closely (being from NZ, Sprint's antics are not of particular interest), however I have seen it said in a few posts about this that some of the customers that breached their call threshold were repeatedly calling to try and deal with billing issues and their call numbers were so high because they got repeatedly put on hold and gave up or got cut off.

While I agree that dumping needy customers makes sense, shouldn't you first look to understand why your customers are appearing needy?

# July 9, 2007 8:39 PM

Eric Wise said:

I'm confident that in order to make such a ballsy move they had to do due diligence. If not, then the market will punish them.

# July 9, 2007 10:47 PM

camera said:

Firing customers may seem reasonable to many of us when we look purely at the financial aspect, but it is ominous from a humanistic and precedent standpoint.

We can only speculate that due diligence and unbiasedness was in play at Sprint. And even if that were the case, it doesn't mean it's always the case. What if the most needy customers were over the age of 75? Wouldn't that be just a veiled form of age discrimination? Doesn't this open the door to all kinds of discrimination and abuse?

I don't understand how you believe the market would "punish" an offending company -- or how market economics would "correct" the situation since the market would be absorbing the highest support cost customers. What if every wireless company decided to fire these same 1000 customers? Then what?

Every customer base is a bell curve. Some outstanding folks, some jerks, most are fine and reasonable. The funny thing is that when you fire your most costly 10%, you inherit a whole new crop of most costly 10%.

# July 10, 2007 9:30 AM

Peter Ritchie said:

There's some clients you just can't satisfy, and there's some that do everything to try and take advantage of you. But, there's also high-maintenance clients because of the quality of your product; when you start firing clients because of that you've got a serious problem.

# July 20, 2007 9:45 PM