I would tend toward agreeing with you, but were I in your class, and
especially if I was having or had had problems getting satisfaction from
a company, I would be asking why that's only a one-way street.
To continue your analogy -- why would you force everyone who comes
in your restaurant to remain there, ragardless of their complaint or
desire to leave, until you made the decision they were giving your wait
staff too difficult a time? Everybody you haven't cut loose has to pay
for a month of dinners before you allow them to leave -- without benefit
of eating the meals for which you've required them to pay.
Craig Froehle wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
--
/"Thirty-five million deaths leave an empty place at only one family
table." /
(News commentator Eric Severied in a radio essay on the 25th
anniversary of the start of World War Two. 8/31/64)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
