Sprint Wireless Making Strong Headway in Customer Satisfaction

Sprint recently hosted its annual analyst day at its campus in Kansas City, and one thing that was on the tip of every Sprint executive’s tongue was customer satisfaction. Management shared a variety of data from numerous sources showing the dramatic improvement that Sprint has made in its customer satisfaction and all the related metrics, including customer care, call satisfaction, churn, first call resolution, etc. 

This trend carries through to our own studies and suggests that Sprint will continue to be a competitive participant in the US wireless market.

It can be argued that comparing Sprint’s improvement to its own scores may not be the best indicator of competitive position, given its struggles in recent years.  Things started going downhill when Sprint acquired Nextel in 2005 – a merger that would land it in Bloomberg’s “third worst" acquisition from 2005 to 2008. Sprint suffered on many fronts, but to the end user, the most apparent decline was in customer satisfaction, as Sprint plummeted to last place among national carriers for customer service. 

To be fair, customer dissatisfaction is not exactly foreign to the wireless industry. From 2004 through 2009, the Better Business Bureau received more complaints about wireless providers than any other business segment, even as net complaints per subscriber improved over time.  (In 2003, the BBB received one complaint for every 200 wireless subscribers, and by 2009 it was down to one complaint for about every 300 subscribers.)  

Moving back to the present, Sprint management has engineered an impressive turnaround over the past couple of years, even when compared to its peers. In new data for this year’s ATLANTIC-ACM Business Connectivity and Wireless Business Report Card, which gathers carrier feedback from business and enterprise customers, Sprint scored about 10 percent higher across key operations categories year-over-year.  Standouts include a 17-percent increase in Sprint’s score for proactive and consultative selling, and 12 percent for customer service. 

To answer the obvious question, yes, there were industry-wide increases in these same categories, but no carrier logged the improvements Sprint made in overall scores, which lifted overall industry averages. Sprint logged the highest average score in four out of the six major operations categories measured in this year’s study, earning ATLANTIC-ACM awards for sales reps, provisioning, billing and straight-up customer service.

The challenge, for Sprint, is these achievements are significant but do not change harsh marketplace realities. It must contend with two formidable competitors, and if the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is consummated, Sprint will be a more distant third to AT&T and Verizon. The implications of relative scale, when it comes to device exclusivity on top of the meat-and-potatoes costs of doing business, will present ongoing challenges. 

But, for now, Sprint’s domination of the prepaid market, return to positive subscriber growth and turnaround in customer satisfaction all point in the right direction for a carrier that has spent much of its recent history on the ropes. 

Fedor Smith is president of ATLANTIC-ACM, a provider of strategy research, consulting and benchmarking services to telecommunications and information industry companies. An expert in niche- and channel-based marketing and operations management, Smith specializes in customer satisfaction and benchmarking projects for ATLANTIC-ACM, where he oversees proprietary projects as well as the firm's Carrier Report Card series, which serves as the telecommunications industry's principal source of benchmarking tools.