This story broke a few days ago, but I thought I’d write about it anyway. I feel that I need to voice my opinion here...

I don’t know of any instance where it is good for a company to lose a customer, but apparently Sprint doesn’t care much about that, because they intentionally cancelled the contracts of 1,000 customers. Why? Because these 1,000 customers called Sprint’s customer service too much. Sprint thought that it would be more cost effective to simply cancel the contracts, rather than to keep answering annoying phone calls.

Now, I realize that some people will complain about anything under the sun, but it could be that some of these people are just trying to resolve issues with their service and feel that they aren’t getting anywhere. You know what it’s like – you call the customer service line for some company that you do business with – you wait on hold for 20 to 30 minutes – someone finally answers – and after asking you your entire life history – they ultimately fail to answer your question or to provide any solutions for your problem!

Well Sprint, I have some suggestions for you:

#1. When a customer calls to complain, you should ensure that their problem is resolved and that they are happy with the resolution before you let them off the phone...resolve customer problems and make sure that you answer all of their questions the first time that they call, and then these annoying customers won’t have to call back!

#2. If too many customers are calling customer service with questions that you believe are trivial, post the answers to those “trivial questions” on the FAQ section of your website...and you can state that customers can find certain answers to certain questions on your website on your freakin’ automated answering system

#3. If you have a customer that is complaining, and no answer seems to be satisfying them, try giving them a small discount or a couple a free minutes...doing so normally keeps customers happy and gives your company a good rapport with the public...it may cost a little bit in the short run...but it won’t cost as much as losing that customer and not gaining a few others because that customer goes and tells everyone they know just how crappy your service is

#4 If you really want to save some money, don’t have a customer service department at all, then you won’t have to pay all those employees