Christopher Carfi

Sprint has fired over 1,000 of their customers.  On June 29, 2007, Sprint sent out letters to a number of customers that stated:

"Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information…Therefore, after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007."

Here’s a copy of the letter:

image: MissDiva

I think Sprint’s move is terribly, well…uncreative.  You’ve got a group of over 1,000 very vocal customers.  Is there not a way to turn all that energy to good, mutual, use, where the customers can get their problems solved and can provide the organization with information or ideas that could help the rest of the customer base?  It makes me wonder — were the problems that these customers were having with the service unique in some way that made them difficult to resolve?  Or are the problems endemic within Sprint’s processes, and it’s just this group of customers that were actually following up and attempting to get them resolved, instead of rolling over?

(If you remember, I’ve had my own issues with Sprint over the past couple of years.)

Who else has had issues with Sprint recently?

More on the story here:

• MissDiva’s thread on the SprintUsers forum (over 103,000 views and 2,200 comments – wow.)
• Engadget – Sprint Lambasted
• Joshua Karp – 1,200 Sprint Customers Getting The Boot
• Alexander Muse – Sprint Fires Customers
• WJXT – Sprint Cuts 1,000+ Customers

Our local Half Moon Bay and Coastside community site, Coastsider.com, puts up its community guidelines.  I loved this one in particular:

6. Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.

Related:  Backfence closes its doors, with commentary from Terry Heaton and Jeff Jarvis. And a spot-on review of a Backfence meeting from last year from Adina Levin.

image: Barry Parr

Seen at today’s Half Moon Bay 4th of July parade.

What’s going on in this picture?  Invent a caption and put it in the comments below:

Remember the unexpected detour to Omaha a couple of weeks back?  Just got a well-handled followup letter in the postal mail from Southwest.

Update:  Whoa.  Looking again at the letter, I just noticed that the department that Melissa works in at SWA is the Proactive Customer Service Communications department.  That’s very cool.

(click the image to make it larger)

When does a customer service process stop serving the customer, and begin to become detrimental to the relationship?  David Cushman tells us:

"My payment for my credit card bill had, apparently arrived a day late. I pay the bill with online banking from an account with another bank. I had set up the instruction to give it the requisite four days to travel through the banking system (and will someone, somewhere please explain to me why that’s still necessary when all that’s being transferred is a notional value carried in digital form?).

A Bank Holiday screwed up the calculation. The punishment for my crime was to be charged a £12 ‘late fee’.

I called to object, pointing out I’ve been a model customer for them for many long years and had made every effort to pay on time on this occasion.

No joy. The poor employee – reading out the script – is clearly told they must stick to the line no matter what the logic of the argument they are met with, no matter what the quality of the customer.

It’s their customer policy not to refund late fees.

Let me tell you. it’s not a customer policy at all. I asked how much my late payment had actually cost. Couldn’t answer. I guessed in the region of a couple of quid. And for this, you are willing to end your relationship with a model customer? How much more is it going to cost you to recruit the next one? Staggering!"

Staggering, indeed.  Remember the levels of interaction that occur as a customer relationship progresses:

Transaction => Conversation => Relationship => Community

If a vendor chooses to only concentrate (and remain!) at the Transaction level, that vendor is guaranteed to eventually become a commodity, lose its competitive differentiation and eventually be supplanted.  A customer service strategy that rigidly holds internal process over serving the customer’s needs is destined to fail.

(iTunes) (MP3) (click here to subscribe)

Episode 20, about 30 minutes.

Today’s Topic:  A Conversation with Derek Powazek

•     The Story of JPG Magazine
   
•     Gaming the System for Good
•     Extremism and Sites Like Digg
   
•     Wikipedia and Big Ideas
   
•     Threadless as Community Business
   
•     Assignment Zero and Pro/Am Journalism
   
•     Community Hangover?
   

Related Links:

Derek Powazek
Design
for Community
Publishing Before the Web – Newspaper
JPG Magazine – The Story
8020
Publishing
Access and Control Lead to Relationships
Gaming Can a Positive Impact – Embrace the Game
– 10 Photos per day
– Use Theme
– Encourage Friends to Vote (Digg, etc.)
Editors Make Final Call
Extremism and The Problem with Digg
Kuro5hin – Built Without an
Editor
NewsAssignment
Tom Coates on Wikipedia
Wikipedia Required a Big Idea
Threadless and Creative
vs. Financial Rewards
Threadless as Example for Doing Community Business
Lulu for Printing
Community Business Model
AssignmentZero
for Pro/Am Journalism Wiki
"Community" – Using the Web For What It’s Good At

Am in the UK this week, and therefore bummed I’m not going to be at the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Open Space workshop on Tuesday leading up to the launch of Supernova.

A couple of links of note:

• Joe Andrieu, on having the customer (that’s us) be the "data integration point" of vendor interactions.

• Howard Greenstein has put up a number of video interviews as part of the Supernova effort, with a number of folks answering the question "what is ‘the New Network?’"  Included were David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, Andrew Rasiej, Chris Meyer and yours truly.  (Thanks again, Howard, for the invitation to participate!)

Main Supernova site is here.

Sean O’Driscoll:

"I can drop you as a service provider.”

“Yes, you could do
that.”

This was maybe the most depressing part of the call.  She
really didn’t care.  And it was clearly not because she’s a bad
person but because she has given up on her own employer.  I actually
felt sorry for her.  I couldn’t yell at her.  I said goodbye.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Doug Engelbart at his home, at the invitation of Mei Lin Fung.

We chatted for about an hour, covering everything from the changes he’s seen over his decades as a visionary and pioneer, to his current thoughts on Collective IQ.

We dove right in, and just before the tape started rolling he had just showed me a one-handed, chording keyboard that he’d invented in the 1960’s that he still uses today.  The first story is classic…using the same concepts as the chording keyboard, it’s a tale of how he taught his daughters to communicate silently with each other using base2, which came in handy when they were taking tests in school or when their mom thought they were asleep.  🙂

Have a listen.