Sprint Cancelling Military Members and Customer Service "Abusers"

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I've read several blogs and articles about Sprint dropping customers for various reasons. The one that upsets me the most revolves around 200 soldiers getting dropped because they roamed too much. The other is regarding the "excessive" use of Customer Service and folks getting terminated.

In my case, Sprint "gave me a break," by allowing me to suspend my service while deployed. When I reactivated they "rewarded" for my service by tacking on a brand-new 2 year contract. I'll be dumping them soon in favor of my new iPhone.

The 1st story is about the customer service issue. The 2nd story is about soldiers getting their service cancelled for excessive roaming. Read on below:

From ZDNET:
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when you're getting dumped by your cell phone carrier.

After eight years as a Sprint Nextel customer, Rene, who goes under the pseudonym MissDiva on SprintUsers.com, received a letter from Sprint Nextel telling her they were done.

As is the case at the end of many relationships, Rene--who doesn't want her last name used because she was publicly criticized after posting her saga on the SprintUsers.com forum--said she never saw it coming.

"I am very upset," she said. "I was a very loyal customer. I didn't even get the courtesy of a phone call."

Rene's service was cancelled because Sprint said she had called the customer support line too often. In a letter dated June 29, 2007, the company informed her that her service would be terminated on July 30, 2007. The letter also said she wouldn't have to pay the early termination fee, and her account, which she claims she pays in full at the start of every month, would be set to zero.

But while Sprint's letter irked Rene, and most likely other customers who received similar alerts, the company's move shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

For carriers, customer service calls cut into profits. For a typical wireless subscriber who spends about $55 a month on a service, carriers only realize a profit of about $24, according to Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Research. On average, it costs companies between $2 to $3 for every minute a subscriber is on the phone with a customer support representative, he said. This means that all of a carrier's profit for one subscriber is eliminated after only 8 to 12 minutes per month of phone calls to customer support.

"I'm sure they figure they are losing money on these customers," Entner said. "If you run the crude math, you see that customers who excessively use call centers simply aren't profitable."
According to JD Power & Associates, more than half of all wireless users in the U.S. contacted their wireless customer service department in 2006. Of those who contacted customer support, more than 42 percent of customers contacted their providers with billing issues. And 55 percent of those customers made calls due to inaccurate charges.

Still, even though customer support is costly for wireless operators, none of the major carriers, with the exception of Sprint, have a policy of canceling service when customers make too many calls to these hotlines. That said, carriers including AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, all reserve the right to cancel contracts if the majority of their service is used over a roaming network.

Too much roaming can get you cut, too "We don't cancel customers no matter how many times they call customer support," said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. "But we do have a policy against excessive roaming. We realize people will roam from time to time, but we have planned our network for a certain amount of roaming and expect our customers to spend the vast majority of their time on the AT&T network."

Furthermore, Siegel adds that AT&T warns customers that their roaming privileges will be reduced after 30 days, or gives subscribers 60 days to find a new provider.

Verizon has gotten flack recently for canceling subscribers' contracts when people exceeded 5MB of data usage per month on its network. The company advertises its service as unlimited, but Jeffery Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said that using this much bandwidth per month is an indication that customers are using the service for activities that are explicitly prohibited by the usage terms.

Entner said that regardless of the reason, carriers do not take lightly the decision to terminate a customer's contract, especially since it costs them between $300 and $350 to obtain each wireless customer. At this rate, carriers only start making money on new customers after one year of service.

"They don't do this willy-nilly or capriciously," Entner said. "Sometimes they keep customers even if they are slightly unprofitable simply to avoid the bad publicity or to keep their churn rates lower. So if they get to the point where they terminate a customer, usually the problems are really significant."

Indeed, Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton said the company only terminates contracts as a last resort. She wouldn't discuss the specific details of any particular customer's situation, but she said the cancellation letters issued on June 29 only impacted a "small minority" of customers. She would not specify how many.

"We have to be able to quickly and efficiently serve customers," Singleton said. "And when we are unable to consistently solve our customers' problems, it results in a lot of frustration and longer waits for other customers. So after looking through our records, we were able to determine that there were customers (whose needs) we couldn't meet."

Also from ZDNet:

Things are really heating up on the SprintUser.com Forum.
According to Shafted_Sprint, Sprint has been cancelling accounts due to “excessive roaming.”
Some 200 of these cancellations are military accounts.

Uh, last time I checked, “roaming” was in the job description of a soldier.
You don’t have to be a fan of the Iraq War to support these men and women who are putting their life on the line for us.

For Sprint, though, it would appear that “life on the line” is an inferior meme to “bottom line.”
Are you ready to get really, really pissed off?

Here’s what Shafted_Sprint writes:
I have been a Sprint customer for over 5 years now. Just shortly after my unit returned from Iraq, we recieved notification that we would be redeployed to West Point to train cadets over the summer. With almost 1/3 of the unit being Sprint customers, almost 200 soldiers, one of the first things we did was get online and consult Sprints coverage map to ensure that we would have service once we arrived. We where relieved to see that we would in fact have service and did not take any preventive measures in making sure that we would be able to maintain a reliable means of communication to our families back home. The area we would be staying in was actually catagorized as having “best” coverage.

After we arived however, we where disgruntled to find that the service was not “best”, there was no service at all. A few of us that used Sprints free roaming feature informed others of this service Sprint offered, and many called and enrolled. Even with roaming, calls are sketchy at best, and very unreliable, but we where satisfied to at least be able to call home for a few minutes an evening and let our families know that we where well.

And now comes the kicker. Many of us Sprint customers recieved a letter at the begining of this month declaring that our Sprint account will be cancelled on July 30th due to the amount of roaming we are doing. The letter stated that they believe that another carrier will be able to serve us better and that we are recieving the boot. Keep in mind, we are not here permanently, or by choice. This is a two month obligation that we had to fulfil, and because of it, Sprint is telling us good bye. We will be returning to our home station, where we have clear Sprint service, FIFTEEN days after the cancellation of our accounts. I personally know at least 10 soldiers that called and explained this situation to Sprint and was told everything was fine.
Because we recently came back from a deployment to Iraq, many Sprint users bought new phones in order to catch up the updates in technology that we missed out on over the 12 months we spent out of country. As we all know, Sprint phones are not interchangable with other carriers, and these are basically going to be very expensive paper weights for many members of the unit. I broke my phone on a training excercise, and did not have insurance on it, so I called to order a new phone. Sprint sold me a new phone at full price THE DAY that thier cancellation notice was mailed to me. When I ordered the new phone, I agian asked the sales rep about the free roaming, and explained my current situation, and was told that everything was fine, and asked for my credit card information.

This is the icing on the top as far as Sprint Customer Service goes. Why on earth I cant get coverage at the United States Military Academy, 40 minutes away from New York City is a mystery to me. I had a cell phone the entire time I was in Iraq with a middle eastern company. I payed LESS to call home and keep in touch from the otherside of the world than I do now with Sprint to call within the country. It also did not matter if I was in a major city or out in the middle of nowhere in the desert, I ALWAYS had full coverage. Never had a dropped call, and the customer reps of that company spoke better English than those with Sprint do.

This is just step one, next I will be contacting every news agency I can get ahold, with the support of 200 to be canceled soldiers, and then my Senator.

Hey I feel like doing the same. I mean, being dumb is one thing. Messing with our men and women in uniform– so beyond the top of the scale."

Pretty outrageous stuff. Write a senator or congressman. Call Sprint customer service. Do something to help these folks!!!!