It seems that Sprint has “fired” some of their customers. Good for them.
With some of these “demon” customers, it becomes unprofitable and not worth the abuse to your employees to keep a customer with whom you can’t reach contentment. And companies should take the bold step to “break-up” with them.
But can there be more than one side to these situations? If you’re feeling great that you got rid of your problem customer, you should examine why there was a problem in the first place.
Granted, there are nutty people who just enjoy complaining. But I have had experiences with corporations bad enough to warrant me harassing them to get satisfaction. Sometimes it takes calling a customer service line multiple times before you can get a real person that will look past operations and procedures long enough to actually help a customer.
Now, I think Sprint did the right thing in this instance. But too many companies have set up a system that demands that customers must be a bit of a demon before they can get the attention that they deserve.
Chris
It’s all nice and fuzzy to talk about how they could have fixed the problem to leverage better customer service for all, ort the worst customers are our best learning tools, but really, would this be viable. If a problem (for these customers) was not going to be fixed by the 3rd call (let alone 20th) something must not be right.
Imagine if it was a product line that causes a business this much trouble. They would eliminate the unprofitable SKU’s and focus their energy (and money) to where they would get the best response (and ROI).
There is nothing wrong with selecting your customers.
However, from a marketing and PR perspective, the best approach is to offer product and service bundles so that customers self-select (and self-deselect) themselves either to higher cost offerings (for more expensive customers) or not at all.
Cheers
I’m not sure if it was a wise decision on the part of Sprint. Most customers are like demons sometimes. But if appropriate customer service is provided, I think there would be less problems like this.
I also think that every side should be considered before making serious decisions that can affect the business.
Customers keep the business alive. Getting rid of them is like dying.
I don’t think companies that recognizes their customers only if they are demon enough would be successful in their relationship with the customers. I’m sure customers will not agree with that.
I agree with Sprint. In the end they probably wasted a lot of time on these problem customers. All customers don’t automatically equal more money. If you think about the time you spend on these problem customers, money is actually lost in the end.
Jennifer Melinas