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Last time we covered Sprint customer service, it was close around the time when Dan Hesse had recently become Sprint’s new CEO and the debacle of the Nextel merger was fresh in everyone’s minds. In that interview, he covered the elephant in the room by telling us what he was going to do to reduce Sprint’s churn rate (customers defecting to other carriers) and to improve Sprint’s notoriously ‘cut-throat’ customer service.

At the time Sprint also ranked last in a J.D. Power & Associates study of telecom customer service (Verizon and T-Mobile topped the charts while AT&T and Alltel were in the middle).
One of the many ‘fire-side chats’ by Sprint CEO Dan Hesse in an attempt to improve the company’s image

Since then, Dan’s been on the front lines in commercials trying to repair Sprint’s image with sincerity.

While the company has decided to pull the public relations move, you’ve got to give him some credit. How many CEO do you recognise by face that represent their company?

Alas, Sprint still had 1.3 million subscribers leave. Its biggest rival, Verizon Wireless, added 1.4 million customers in the same quarter, while AT&T, added 2.1 million. Interestingly enough, it was expected to be worse and so it’s stock ended up rising 19%.

One might say that they’re not ‘failing as badly’. It’s like your parents expected you to get an ‘F’ on your report card but instead you got a ‘D’. Improvement but….you still failed the class. What can you say?

More importantly, the 2009 Wireless Customer Care Performance Study (by J.D. Power & Associates) ranked Sprint customer service 2 out of 5…

The study looked at time taken to answer calls, time taken to resolve (total number of calls) as well as the actual problem to be resolved.

And they came in last…ouch.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve personally never had any problems with Sprint customer service. As a matter of fact, all my dealings have been pleasant. This bears some significance in the grander scheme of things. While they got the worst rating, most of this is happening to cell phone subscribers. The real take-away point is this:

If you get mobile broadband with Sprint, you probably will not be calling customer service often.

In other words, don’t let this weigh too heavily in your decision for or against them. While it may be the nature of phones to have fluctuating bills and strange happenings you need to call in about, the issues that happen with mobile broadband are usually something you’d need to talk to tech support (not your average customer service rep).

So to give a fair and accurate picture, Sprint’s customer service definitely needs work. The fact of the matter is that if you’re dealing solely with mobile broadband, you may not end up calling them often. I’ve had the service for a year at the time of this writing and I’ve called twice. Both calls took less than 5 minutes.

Not too shabby.

Final Thoughts

If you’d like to get Sprint, here’s where you can get some free broadband cards.

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