Customer Experience - A Bad Example or a New Way to Get Rid of Unprofitable Customers?

Sprint has decided to cancel service for over 1000 customers because they call customer service too much. Is this a Sprint service/product, customer service or a revenue/cost per customer issue?

Every call to a customer service agent at a large company costs that them money. Anywhere from $5.00 to $20.00 depending on whether the call is handled domestically or internationally and how long the agent/customer talk. A few calls are factored into an average customer support cost over the lifetime value of the customer. However, imagine if a customer has a $19.99 a month plan or low-value plan and they begin to call over the threshold of the model. Therein lies the Sprint story with this group of customers. They simply become “unprofitable” or less desirable to the company.
The decision must have been an economic exercise likely executed by a product or pricing organization within the company without much consultation of the corporate communications or public relations teams. The impact of bad press from the move should be interesting to watch. A quick scan of Technorati revealed a couple hundreds posts, but how many people read the Wall Street Journal article, saw the MSN coverage, or MSNBC.com story online? A couple of million or more? For a 1000 customers that a pretty bad hit to a company and brand that have acknowledged issues with their customer service programs in the wake of the merger with Nextel.
One just hopes other companies don’t begin to take this approach to managing and exiting their customers. Maybe if customer experience was better then those customers would have call so much.

Blake

Visible Technologies