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July 19th, 2007 
QuadsZilla The customer is always right.
We’ve all heard that expression but the fact of the matter is that the customer is usually wrong.
Sprint recently made a bold move:
Recently, Sprint decided to cut its losses and give a number of CSRs a break from the nagging when it pulled the plug on nearly 1,200 of its mobile customers. Apparently, these whiners were dialing in “40 to 50 times as often” as the “average customer,” and after failing to appease them, the firm chose to “terminate the relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options.”
Good for Sprint! In most businesses, you will find that 5% of you customers create 95% of your headaches. Sometimes, the best solution is to just tell those customers that things are not working out and they should pursue other options. Work with customers you like and your days will be more enjoyable.
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This is disgusting, getting fucking screwed over by big companies; what the fuck? We’ve got to sign their goddamned fucking contracts and get penalized when we don’t stick to them, why shouldn’t they have to stick with it? This is egregious and will lead to a class action lawsuite.
Update.
btw, these customers did not have to pay the penalties to get out of the contract.
Fantastic idea. I hope people have the balls to carry it through, annoying companies should be let go of quickly. We had one scoundrel (Ian Partington) who constantly nibbled at our heels (10 complaints a week about things “not being good enough”), stole our work as his own in press releases, and eventually got away with $20k in unpaid invoices. Painful clients like these should never be given credit, and shed at the earliest opportunity. After all – time is money, and we’re only working to make ourselves happy in the mid/long term. Dealing with these buggers all day won’t get us there.
As for the Sprint customers, businesses should certainly be treated with more prejudice than individuals (the purpose of every business is, after all, to make money), although no individual has the right to be served by any corporation or shop. Being a customer is a privilege.
I would like to point out that these were not “customers” in the normal sense. These people were ringing every single day to get “free credits” so that they never had to pay for the bill.
They were actually defrauding Sprint. However, the latest cock up on sprints side is turning 200 soldiers phone contracts off because they “roam too much”. Go read up on that one
Dave
http://www.burntpocket.com
@itrends – that’s terrible! (Or maybe it’s just Sprint’s way of protesting the war in Iraq
)
In the knowledge space that I’ve been in, I’ve heard of a lot of people “firing customers” lately.
In his book “The Four Hour Work Week”, Tim Ferriss talks about concentrating on the 20% of customers who represent 80% of your profits…
And yesterday, James Brausch blogged about deliberately blocking hotmail/aol/gmail/yahoo e-mail account holders from his subscription lists to avoid spam blacklisting (check it out: http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=708 )
Personally, I don’t see too much harm in it. I just find it interesting that people aren’t using the “Customer is always right” line any more… Perhaps now “You’re right until you’re unprofitable”.
Well, as for the main points of the article, I highly recommend that you do fire your bottom-level customers in order to maximize profits. This is dependent on how large your service is and the reach and scalability you have. I highly recommend this tactic, but the funny thing about this article is the fact that Sprint is just a commodity business. If I were them, I’d try to figure out the full values of everyone down to the dots and watch the metrics. It was likely a good decision but of course…customers are truly only cattle. Hey, we all are – herd mentality should be reinforced with full monetization of certain segments.