Mark Gibbs says goodbye to Mr. Hesse and his company.
Dear Mr. Hesse,
May I call you Dan? I’ll assume that will be a “yes.” Well, Dan, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing. Could it be because of the TV ads Sprint has been running recently? Nope, it’s not that, although while we’re on the topic I feel compelled to tell you they aren’t very good.
All that moody, washed-out color, with out-and-about locations, and the “I’m just a guy” thing doesn’t work, particularly when you pitch the same old rhetoric that the whole cellular industry keeps recycling … you know, tired old saws about “Our network is engineered for today and for tomorrow” and “This could be the only phone you’ll ever need” (the latter being the silliest assertion ever).
Anyhow, what has me writing is to say “goodbye.” You see, I’m a customer or, at least, I’m a customer at the moment, a situation that won’t last for much longer.
What is it that’s making me abandon the Sprint ship and head off to new seas of service? Well, it started with the call quality; out here, in the boonies north of Los Angeles, call quality has been good at best, but usually just adequate.
You, like all of the cellular service providers, bang on about your low levels of dropped calls when just about every consumer will tell you they get randomly disconnected often enough to be unimpressed by any such claim. You guys don’t get it; you may have the lowest rate of dropped calls, but if we get any drops at all we see that as failure. One in a thousand is the same to us as one in a hundred: Your service drops calls.
But what is really pushing me away is this sorry tale. The display on my wife’s phone stopped working. As we had opted for your freebie phones we hadn’t bothered with insurance, taking a gamble on the phones lasting until contract termination. To investigate my options I started poking around your Web site (which needs some serious usability testing, by the way) for a replacement phone and discovered Sprint really doesn’t get it.
One of your cheapest phones, the Samsung Seek, costs $229, but with a new two-year contract and various discounts it turns out to be free. For me, as an existing customer with one year into a two-year contract, this phone with online upgrade pricing (a $75 discount … woo-hoo!), works out to $154.99 and would lock me into a new contract that would keep me hooked to Sprint until June 2012.
If instead I decide to leave Sprint, the pro-rated early termination fee on my contract works out to $110. So, I could pay the ETF and go to, say, Verizon, and score my wife a BlackBerry Curve for $30, and be $15 better off! Actually, for the $30 I would get two Curves.
I called your customer service (which is a hopeless mess of poorly trained drones relentlessly and irritatingly trying to sell-through and plead for high satisfaction survey ratings … so sad) and after two tries that subtracted 30 minutes from my life managed to get to your customer retention department.
I explained the logic and asked if they wanted to keep me as a customer. The answer was — no surprise here — no, they did not. Unless I paid for the crap phone and re-upped there was nothing they could do. Your marketing department is obviously not doing its job.
So, Dan, it’s goodbye. I won’t miss Sprint and you’ve given me no reason to stay. See you on TV. Or better yet, I won’t.
Yours sincerely,
Mark Gibbs, Ventura, Calif.
PS. You can reply to backspin@gibbs.com.
PPS. I can provide marketing consulting.
