Blog: John Myers

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Opportunity Cost

I found this article on Sprint's customer service practices and found it quite interesting....

One, it wasn't on cnn.com or easily found googling around unless you were directed to a consumer "defense" website.

Two, it shows how fast a bad customer service situation can go from "this shouldn't cause too much trouble..." into "...coming to you live from Overland Park; and now back to you in the studio...."

Finally, it shows that some companies are finally starting to take seriously the "offloading" of troublesome or negative equity customers. For many years, the airline industry has had practices similar to this by "offloading" tourists on to other carriers only to pick up the more valuable business traveler (yep charging higher prices actually creates better customers....). While I don't agree with the way that Sprint executed their plan, I do agree with the concept that customers who longer offer value to the company should be shown the door.

NOTE - All businesses beware.... Don't offload customers just because they are troublesome! There is gold in "dem dar customers". Find the right offering to make them valuable customers. Grow them from negative equity to neutral to positive. Or find the price point that will make them revenue neutral and/or churn all by themselves.... The PR costs of "releasing" them can be just too troublesome... :)

Technorati Tags: Telecommunications, Telecom, Sprint, Customer Value

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