Sprint...

Ah, Sprint… I hear there are more financial knocks to my former employer.  I won’t slam them or the 65,000 employees who are all trying their darnedest to be a good company.  I will suggest that Sprint should examine its history and determine what has lead from the 90’s to here.

 

When I started with Sprint, I remember listening to Bill Esry (the CEO) give speech after speech stating, “We must return value to the shareholder.”  That was his goal for about 30 years.  Cynics will immediately see the flaw in that philosophy, but for the non-cynics I’ll explain.  While yes, every corporation exists to make money and probably make money ultimately for shareholders, it is not much of a “purpose.”  It is hard to rally folks around the idea of making very rich men richer.  This doesn’t impress your customers much either.  Sprint is merely living the legacy of this long standing policy.

 

Now when Foresee took over as CEO, he at least started talking about the customers again.  I felt pretty good about that.  It was the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, Gary just never delivered on it.  Now to be fair, it can’t be easy to undo the customer screwing philosophy of 30 years.

 

Now Dan Hesse says they’ve “rolled out a new customer service culture.”  I hate to neigh-say, Dan, but you don’t “roll out a new culture.”  You can start to change a culture, you can make it a focus, you can work on it over the course of 2-5 years, but it falls well short of “rolling out”.  Still, I commend the effort.  It is sorely needed.  But Dan will fall in to the same trap as Gary if he can’t morph the culture into real customer service results.

 

Now don’t be too hasty.  It would seem natural to assume that poor customer service has equalled a loss of 700,000 subscribers.  That’s not as straight forward as it may seem.  That silly iPhone device launched last year and it pulled away a huge hunk of the technocrat market—Sprint’s self-stated target market.  Plus what is “poor customer service” anyway?  What made the service poor?  Gotta ask those questions—not just flog the call centers.  I would suggest that Sprint go right back to the foundation and eliminate vast numbers of its aging service plans.  I think a great deal of why accounts are perpetually mishandled is that the rating plans are too complex.  It is creating its own errors instead of facilitating easy commerce.  Sprint has well over 9000 billing plans… probably 90% of them are just copies of themselves with minor variations.  Way too easy to screw up a poor customer service rep.

 

Sprint also needs to learn how to say “no”.  Sprint has always had fantastic ideas and goals.  But for each great idea there are 15 bad to outright stupid ideas.  All of which Sprint attempts to implement—fully negating the great ideas.  This is where the leadership at Sprint has really failed.  For whatever reasons no short list of great ideas has been allowed to complete with clear and utter refusal of bad ideas.  Ironically, Sprint is lacking Vision.

 

Get out your binoculars, Dan!  Find a clear pass and herd your company into it.  There will be stragglers, let them die.  There will be other paths that may work… but avoid them.  Clear and Concise is what you need.  Good Luck!