Tuesday, July 10, 2007

No soup for you!

Have you read about Sprint cutting people off?

Seems as though Sprint is taking on the attitude that if you call them too much, you'll get dropped. Sounds like they think they're an insurance company not a phone carrier. I wonder if you only call twice in the life of your contract they'll give you a refund.

I deal with customer service departments every day. Lets face it, most customer service agents are great reading off a script, but the second you go off script they're clueless. And that's if you can even understand them.

Another point is that the way most customer service departments are setup, there's no incentive for the Customer Service Agent to actually solve your problem. They get financial incentives for closing problems, not solving problems. Ever open a trouble ticket with a certain database vendor and they work on it for a while and then say you have to open a new trouble ticket because they can't solve the problem?

Everybody knows (I know Tom, there are exceptions, but in general) that it costs more to attract customers than to keep them. I can't see many people actually wanting to talk to somebody half a world away on the phone 50 times a month. But that's just me.

Extra credit: Where does "No soup for you!" come from?

3 comments:

Jared said...

"No soup for you!" is from "The Soup Nazi" Episode of Seinfeld.

Joel Garry said...

A comment I heard on the radio about this was to the effect of "if the service is that bad, they should consider themselves lucky to get out of the contract with no payment penalty."

And I'd believe it if some of those people were just plain psycho tele-stalkers.

But if anyone is just a regular person with a legitimate complaint, they oughta sue and complain to the regulators. I have no love for crappy telephone providers, that's for sure.

Anonymous said...

"the targeted subscribers each made an average of 40 to 50 calls a month to customer service"

Now that's either some seriously screwed up problems that they were dealing with or these are people with some kind of mental health problem. I don't make that many phone calls a month to the entire world.