Should Sprint's Customer Managers Be Fired?

The Sprint 1,000 story has hit the headlines. And as more facts emerge about what actually happened, it is looking increasingly bad for Sprint. But who takes responsibility for this PR, and thus customer business disaster?

The facts as currently known seem to be:

1. The decision to fire customers was arbitrary. They did not fire customers with a negative lifetime value, just a small sample of those with a recent history of service problems.

2. Much of the service problems were caused by Sprint's failure to deliver what had been bought and compounded by their failure to fix it when customers brought the failure to Sprint’s attention.

3. Sprint didn't try to fix the problem at source, thus removing the problem for other customers. Nor did they try any number of obvious alternative solutions suggested in the CustomerThink discussion.

4. Sprint handled the PR side of their decision with crass incompetence. A number of customers have been reinstated after complaints. The general public is up in arms.

5. This all comes within an industry with a reputation for overselling, under-delivery and customer disservice.

I respect the inalienable right for company executives to decide for themselves which customers they serve and which they do not. But company executives should look to solve their customer management problems at home before simply pushing them onto customers and into the public spotlight.

Shareholders have every right to ask whether Sprint's customer management executives who decided to fire the Sprint 1,000 have acted in shareholders best interests and to dismiss them if they are found badly wanting.

What do you think?

Should Sprint's customer managers be fired? Or is not doing your job competently acceptable in the C-Suite today?

Post a comment and get the conversation going.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager