What I'm about to say here will probably be met with indignant gasps and muttered profanities, but what Sprint's doing is *exactly* what I teach my students they should consider doing.
As a business school professor, one of the courses I teach is Service Operations Management. In that course, I show a graph that looks like a J that has been rotated 200 degrees clockwise. The x-axis is "customer retention rate" and the y-axis is profits. As you start retaining more and more of your customers, your profitability increases...to a point. At some point, you're retaining customers you really shouldn't, as they cost you more to service them than they generate in revenue for you. Say you ran a restaurant. Would you be happy to serve a customer who comes in and takes up a booth for hours, uses napkins and silverware, sugar, milk, stirrers, uses up your wait staff's time, but only orders a 29-cent cup of coffee? No...you can't run a business with customers like that. I fully understand that Sprint is partly to blame -- Sprint's customer service is lousy, which may be causing some of the repeat calling. But, there are always going to be customers who simply cannot be satisfied and will continue to leech away your resources unless they are cut free. If Sprint is finally doing that, more power to them. I just hope they do what I teach my students, which is to be really smart in selecting which customers get pared. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
