Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Is Sprint broken?

Sprint dropped its phone subscribers that call customer service 50 times more a month than the average customer.
As Sprint's move shows, some customers aren't worth the hassle Sprint will save a lot of money not supporting these endless calls by an extremely small minority of customers? Won’t they? As a designer of web sites I sometimes have the opportunity to provide customer service. I can relate with Sprint. Out of all the users of one of the sites I supported, the same three people called. One day I receive a call about the servers being down from one of the three. It was an interesting problem because technically the servers were not down. They were running but bogged down to the point they were timing out before sending any web pages. Because the servers had not crashed none of the expensive software to notify the administrators was triggered. I call the administrators and they did not believe me. If the servers for a Fortune 500 company were down they would be getting thousands of calls not to mention all the server software that should be triggered. I finally get them to pull up one of the web sites on their browser. How could hundreds of web sites be down and I be the only one on the phone calling them? In the move to reduce cost and eliminate trivial calls groups like server administrators have insolated themselves so much that nobody can call. As trivial as the things these three users came up with they always seemed to be legitimate. So is the Sprint network down? I am not calling them.

No comments: