Sprint sez providing proper service cuts into the profit margin, so if you’re going to bitch about our every little mistake then you’ll have to leave.
Published by Kyso Kisaen July 7th, 2007 in HUH!?, Moola, TechnologyIf AT&T starts doing this, I promise to start calling them twice a day every day.
If you persistently insist the Sprint fix their numerous errors you will be dropped as a customer, according to reader Michael. He’s been having trouble with Sprint but instead of resolving his problem, they’ve decided to drop him as a customer according to a letter he received yesterday.
Michael claims that he had to call Sprint customer service all the time because they kept making the same errors in his bill over and over again, plus he was unable to get a satisfactory resolution to an expensive phone repair. I think that sounds plausible. Sprint prefers to emphasize the fact that guys like Mike, with their neurotic obsession with not overpaying each and every month, are sucking up valuable and expensive customer service resources. They’ve graciously given him 30 whole days notice and aren’t even charging him the early termination fee, so what else could the man possibly want?
There seem to be two main schools of thought on the situation: the first says that Mike was treated unfairly and should continue to bitch all the way to court. The second says Mike is better off without those douchebags. A third, minor contingent defends Sprint’s right as a profit-making company to eject particularly unprofitable customers; I’d have more sympathy with this viewpoint if the high volume of calls that these customers are making didn’t mostly stem from Sprint’s employees own repeated errors.
The big problem that I see here is that Mike wasn’t able to cancel the contract without heavy fees back when he first realized that Sprint’s service was not satisfactory. Yet somehow, Sprint can drop his ass with a letter that manages to imply that they’re doing him a favor simply by not charging the early termination fee that would apply if he had tried to drop them. I don’t think that Sprint should be forbidden from dropping needlessly expensive customers, but it is not right that the customers can’t drop Sprint if halfway through their contract they find that they are not getting the service that they pay for. Which, you know, *cough* *hint* would be a nice piece of legislation for a certain Congress to pass if they want to show they’ve got the balls to stand up against big business interests, hint, hint. It would make a lot of citizens very happy and probably not cost the poor phone service providers as much as they’d want you to think.
Sprint’s business model seems to be to chase it’s customers off, and not just with this guy.
That said, I’m not sure that it would actually save us money to due away with the Early Termination Fee. Having worked for a big cell phone company, I suspect the result of such a choice would be to see much smaller discounts on phones purchased with a contract. It’s not uncommon for a mobile service provider to loose significant money selling you your phone, hoping to make it back by keeping your business for some time. For comparison, look at what phones purchased without contract or “unlocked phones” cost. If you could switch to a new company every time a phone came out you liked with no fee, there would be little incentive to offer discounts on phones in the first place.
I have plenty of complaints with wireless service providers, and I’m by no means mr. free market or bust. I just wonder if this particular move wouldn’t be counterproductive.
Check out Consumers’ Cellular. I’m not at all sure that eliminating the termination fee would “cause” prices for phones to rise. Y’know, it’s the people that run these companies that “cause” prices for goods and services to rise.