There’s an interesting article in BusinessWeek about the problems going on at Sprint/Nextel and what they’re doing about it. I do not know a single Sprint customer that is pleased with their product and service. It’s really quite astonishing and it’s hurting the company something fierce.

I’m sometimes a defender of shoddy customer service. To be more precise, I get annoyed when people buy the cheapest product they possibly can and then are astonished when the vender they bought from cuts corners. People cringe at the thought of paying more than they have to, even if told that it will come with better customer service. A lot of people say they want good customer service the same way they say that they want the government to have a balanced budget. They like it in the abstract, but are unwilling to support doing what it takes to get there.

Sprint is different, though. It seems like it’s in a league that I reserve for Best Buy, Blockbuster, and health insurance companies. They seem to go out of their way to antagonize you because they believe that you need them more than they need you (which is true of insurance companies, not usually true of Best Buy and Blockbuster, and verifiably false for Sprint). Add to that Sprint’s nasty habit of prolonging contracts indefinitely and it creates a problem of almost Justice Department proportions.

A little over six months ago Sprint cut loose a lot of extremely dissatisfied customers. I was generally supportive of the move as it’s something that helps pave the way for an overhaul in customer service. Unfortunately, Sprint does what a lot of companies do: they pick the low-hanging fruit, but once tough decisions have to be made they abandon the endeavor altogether.

I’m a customer in the AT&T family and have been for the past four or five mergers. I got screwed when I was in Deseret and made the switch to a camera phone, but by and large I’ve been pretty happy with it. They’ve generally been quite upfront about when my contract is about to be extended, but better than that I’ve never had reason to fear a contract extension.

Sprint appears to be moving in the right direction:

Bob Johnson, Sprint’s new chief service officer, has eliminated limits on the amount of time service reps spend on the phone with customers. Instead, he’ll track how frequently reps resolve customers’ problems on the first call. Employees who don’t solve a minimum percentage on the first call won’t be eligible for sales bonuses. {…}

As for the allegations in the two lawsuits, Johnson says Sprint has implemented a zero tolerance policy for shoddy customer service, which includes a new focus on extending contracts only with detailed approvals from customers. Among other things, Sprint sends a letter to customers outlining any changes to their account, and customers have 30 days to cancel the changes.

I wish I’d had 30 days to cancel changes the one time I was screwed by the AT&T family, so it sounds good. These changes are always easy to talk about, though. The question is what happens when the bill comes due. The advantages of these sorts of move often take a long time to materialize. Layoffs and draconian HR policies reap results very quickly.

The most encouraging thing is their new metric system. There’s a saying that if you tell me how a man is measured I will tell you how he will behave. If you only care about call times, as is the case with a lot of call centers, you’re going to get people cutting calls as short as they can with the result of more calls and aggravated customers. When I worked the phone banks for CignalTV (via the largest phone bank outsourcing company), to their credit they accounted for more than simple call-times as part of their formula. Unfortunately they had some pretty rotten incentives when it came to sales.

They never got called on it the way that Sprint has, though, and Cignal didn’t face the kind of competition that Sprint does. Hopefully it all has an effect.