Monday, June 22, 2009

My letter to Daniel R Hesse, CEO of Sprint

Mr. Hesse,

I hope you had an enjoyable weekend and a very nice Father's Day. I wanted to let you know, personally, about my recent experiences with your company's customer service as they have been somewhat lacking. Given that Sprint has spent quite a few dollars in recent months mailing me all kinds of slick, expensive-to-print marketing materials, informing me that I am a Sprint Premier customer, I felt it doubly important to explain to you why I am planning on terminating my Sprint contract in the next 90 days.

For some weeks now, I have been having difficulty with my service. Friday, I decided to look into it and call your support line. While on hold (for 18 minutes, not totally unreasonable, but not exactly wonderful), there was no hold music. There was a periodic click on the line every three or four minutes, but otherwise, there was only silence. The last thing I wanted to do was hang up, dial in again, and go back to the beginning of the queue. As it turns out, I had other things to do with my Friday nightt than to sit on the phone, maybe on hold maybe not, so I just hung up. I was planning on cancelling my Sprint service soon, anyway, so this was just an impetus to get me to do it sooner.

Saturday, I had two missed called that turn out to be an automated survey call from Sprint. I missed both of those calls and just answered the third attempt about 10:00 AM Eastern today, June 22nd. The survey was asking many questions about how my talk went with the tech support agent I spoke to. I would had assumed your company had enough technology in its call centers to realize that mine was an "abandoned call", as the telecom parlance goes, and that I did not, in fact, ever speak to an agent. I was obviously incorrect.

At the end of the automated survey, it asked if I wanted a member of the "Priority Support Team" to call me to work on my issue, as my issue was unresolved. I pressed "1" for yes. I was thinking, for the briefest of moments, that Sprint had finally done something right, and maybe had a chance of turning me around on my poor view of your company and its support.

The recorded voice informed me that a member of the "Priority Support Team" would call me back within five business days.

Mr. Hesse, five days is only considered a priority turn-around if you are trying to re-schedule a space shuttle launch. It is by no means an acceptable turn-around for customer service of any sort, let alone so-called "priority" for a customer that your company has designated a "Sprint Premier Loyalty" customer.

Please remove me from your Sprint Premier Loyalty program, as I have certainly not been treated as such by your organization and Sprint has certainly expressed no loyalty toward me as a customer. If you would also be so kind, I would ask that Sprint waive my contract termination fee, so as to allow me to quicker be done with any dealings with your company.

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

~ Colin