Nearly 40% of Sprint’s customers plan to switch when their contract is up
Sprint needs to run a few extra laps, to catch up with the carrier pack. While Skydeck research shows that overall the majority of consumers (68%) are positive about their carrier’s performance, Sprint is consistently lagging behind Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Here are four supporting examples from our research:
1) General satisfaction: Is my carrier fair and honest? Are bills predictable? Would I recommend them… or switch?
For these questions, Verizon fairs the best, receiving positive feedback from 75% of its customers and negative feedback from only 9%. T-Mobile and AT&T receive negative marks from 12% of their customers, while Sprint’s customers were unsatisfied 19% of the time.
2) Heading for the exits: Sprint customers are significantly more likely to say that they will leave their carrier. Twelve percent plan to switch before their contract expires, and 38% after it expires. Across all of the carriers 9% of people intend to switch before their contract is up, and it 26% when it expires.
3) Do you have a problem? Overall, 90% of people reported that they have had a problem with their cell phone service. Sprint’s customers are the most likely to have had a problem at some point. Verizon’s customers are the least likely.
4) Surprise, surprise.
Twenty-three percent of Sprint’s customers regularly receive surprise bills. In contrast, this drops to 18% for T-Mobile and 15% for AT&T and Verizon.
Sprint has had a troubling run recently. With subscriber losses, a new CEO, and a dissolved Clearwire partnership, the company needs to make a 180 and re-focus its efforts on gaining back customers. We hope that they will follow through on their plans for an open WiMax network, but if all else fails, they can just sell out to Google.
So why is Sprint trailing with customers? There is no one answer to this question, but we’ve heard a lot of anecdotes about lackluster customer service at Sprint: poorly trained phone reps, inconsistent website pricing and plan descriptions, and a habit of only honoring their promises when reminded. We’ve had some personal experience too. An employee of Skydeck applied for a rebate on a Sprint phone and was turned down. A store rep told him “rebates are always denied the first time they are submitted”. We hope that was a joke. The same employee had to follow-up with Sprint multiple times so that they would honor their original in-store promises (e.g., waiving the activation fee.)
Our study was conducted in August 2007 over the Internet (not by telephone). The base was 1,000 US adults. The research was for our own service so we won’t be publishing all the results, but stay tuned for more.
I too fell victim to Sprint’s follies. Any “rumors” you guys have heard about Sprint are probably facts. My wife and I have spent hundreds of hours and hours and hours on the phone and in their stores fighting with them over things we were right on. We were punished for their stupidity over and over. For example one time we asked if my wife and I could write them a post dated check for 7 days which is when we got payed to avoid service interruption, sadly it was a 5 day limit and our service was inevitably interrupted. We tried forever to convince them to see that they were at fault and that we were being punished unjustly. To add insult to injury we were banned from writing them anymore checks. Sprint had a habit of charging us for things like data and we had power vision which is supposed to give us data. We would have to fight with the foreign representatives from Guam or where ever the hell they were from and deal with their gale manners and poor English. They constantly disconnected our phone service claiming we didn’t pay our bill on time when for example a couple days before we paid what we believed was the whole bill for example “$155.91″ and the money shows as withdrawn from our bank account and our online Sprint account said we owed zero balance. Sprint would repeatedly claim “there was a outstanding past due balance” We have a 2 year old at home and we could not afford to be paying week after week to these CUT THROATS so eventually we broke our contract and head for Verizon Wireless. Sure Verizon’s phones are crippled with that poor generic user interface that leaves you with no freedom and the phones themselves are no where near as fun or of good quality as SOME of Sprint’s phones but you weigh the options. I would chose Verizon Wireless with their good customer service and billing over the Sprint NIGHTMARE hands down.
EDIT= I neglected to add that when they interrupted our service with that bogus 7 days that turned out to be 5 days….OUR CHECK BOUNCED AFTER WE TOLD THEM NOT TO CASH IT AND THEN WE STILL PAYED THE NSF $25 fee from the bank and $35 NSF from Sprint too!!!
I am a former Sprint employee that got laid off due to a “40% IT layoff across the board…”: For some reason, in the Board of Director's infinite wisdom, they found it pertinent to give Dan Hesse a 3.5 million dollar bonus while laying off 8,000 employees the first quarter of '09. This is incidental to all the other bonuses Sprint has paid to the “higher ups”. What happened to 'Pay for Performance'? They sure pushed that credo on the rest of us….
I cannot find any logic in what Sprint has done for the past 3 years or so that they have “run the show”. They consistently have made egregious errors in many areas of the business, not the least of which is the HORRIBLE phone support for customers as well as employees; I have consistently spent well over 4 hours and several transfers (most times in circles) just trying to get a simple problem solved. It has been the same rhetoric for years that Sprint will fix these problems.
I in no way am convinced that Sprint's Dan Hesse cares for his employees or the company. Why else would he accept a bonus of such magnitude when the company continues to falter. How many jobs would have been saved had he chose not to be so darned edacious.
The Board of Directors seem to have a habit of finding CEOs that just want to run the company in the ground. The last CEO has to be paid $84,000 a month–FOR LIFE, just because it was written in his contract; this is not a one-time payment of $84,000, this is FOR LIFE that Sprint has to pay him. This is a pitiful sight when a Board can make such incongruous decisions in their policies…decisions that don't seem to be conducive to intelligent, business-growing decisions.
My money is against Sprint. I am more than an disgruntled laid off employee, I am furious at the decisions that Sprint has consistently made–decisions that have put them on the road to failure. I am not suprised in the least with this post. I am shocked that this is not a higher percentage. It is no wonder they are losing people with the silly antics that go on behind the scenes. I would encourage anyone reading this to check for themselves the truths that I have mentioned. It is far worse than I have written; there are bonuses, salaries, “stipends” and legal paybacks that have taken this company to its knees, and the Board of Directors does not seem to care.