An open letter to Sprint CEO — Is Sprint improving customer service?

Columnist Note: In an open letter to Sprint CEO,Dan Hesse: Does Mr. Hesse really believe that Sprint is improving customer service? Not from our experiences. A multi-part experience nightmare! Part one.

Am I the only one completely confused and upset with Sprint's poor customer service? My experience involves them selling products under false pretense, breach of contract and not honoring sales claims by Sprint's sales and customer support representatives. Perhaps it's time for us as consumer to rise and file another Class Action Law Suit. (In August Sprint had to to pay $15M to settle its most recent case.) Haven't you had enough? In today's world, customer satisfaction and retention are the keys to a company's survival. Sprint is selling off its cell towers to raise money to sustain operations. Laying off employees and outsourcing its workforce to foreign countries and losing more customers than any other cellular carrier. Perhaps that is a major reason the company is in a really poor cash position. Sprint's actions impact its' shareholders and well as its customers. Mr. Hesse, please respond to let us help you.

Dear Mr. Hesse, Sprint Board of Directors, et al.

I am writing this open letter to you and the community at large as your public relations department would not schedule a timely interview with you or an executive member of your management team to address the following issues. They have referred me to your executive offices in an attempt to fix issues that many of my readers and I have experienced. I do not know if you know what is going on in your company. Ever since the merger with Nextel, I have been writing this column, but have held off publishing it, to give the company fair time to improve. I think over two years is enough. It's fun, but unnerving to watch you on TV commercials saying that Sprint has worked hard to improve customer service. Not true! A search of “Sprint Customer Service” on You Tube reveals 2,139 poor customer service videos. I will make it easy for you to see this search, just “Click here.”

But, I am not the first to send you an open letter, just perform a Google search on your name, or click here. After your executive bio the number two Google search result for “Dan Hesse Sprint” is from a posting on web site SprintSucks.com. Have you ever done a Google Search with the phrase “Sprint poor customer experience?” There are only 524,000 results for that phrase. Again, let me make it easy for you to review this before you make any more commercials instead of fixing the problem, just click here. The top result is from MSN Money titled “The Customer Service Hall of Shame”. “The results are in, and one company ranks below all the rest: Sprint Nextel, one of the country's largest wireless-phone carriers. A remarkable 40% of people who had an opinion of Sprint's customer service said it was poor. And Sprint was hardly the exception. All of the companies that ranked in our Bottom 10 had customer service rated "poor" by at least 20% of the respondents who expressed an opinion about their service."

Beginning in July 2007, after your merger with Nextel, your information technology integration and failure to properly integrate your billing and customer service has been widely reported in the press. Your company failure to manage the consumer experience, and spending millions of dollars on failed information technology integration projects and a failed roll out of Wi-Max service has severely impacted your shareholders and customers are left holding the bag.

I welcome my readers to report their experiences, as I have spent in excess of 45 hours on the phone with your customer service and executive offices to issue credits for radically incorrect billing overcharges, not just once or twice, but almost every month for almost two years. I have had many false and misleading statements made to me and I have them all documented and recorded.

“You have been made false and misleading statements and sold a product under false pretense,” said a call center supervisor (employee number LZ613769). This is a Sprint employee's statement, not mine but, I could not have put it better myself. Yesterday, I spoke with Hasan Seif, executive services analyst, and his behavior and lack of ability to resolve my issues have been unconscionable. You can call Mr. Seif. His direct line at (817) 215-3143.

Here is a new issue for your review as an example. On October 24, 2009, I spoke with employee AU414751 in regard to activating the Sierra Wireless Card I had just purchased with a replacement for a lost one. During the call the representative offered to sell me a Hero or Palm Pre phone w/rebate. She said I qualified for a discounted phone with rebate because I had not used the upgrade option for my broadband card phone number. I selected and ordered the Sprint Hero and just received it. I specifically asked your employee to look at my account and asked if this would effect all the credits, contract and account adjustments that I just spent weeks working with your team to resolve. I wanted to confirm that this order would not result in any activation fees or new contract periods except for the broadband card service. She confirmed those concerns and said all I would need to pay was a $15 data plan and could swap any of my non-contract phones for the new one. She sold the upgrade very hard. When I called recently and spoke with a call center representative and then a supervisor with employee number LZ613769, I was told they could not honor that offer and the phone was sold under a false pretense.

Dan, lets talk. Please give me call or send me an e-mail. I have sent this to your public relations team and a review of my account will reveal two years of calls and thousand of dollars of credit issued back to me as a result of poor business practices by Sprint. I am sure the community and I would like to help Sprint. You have some new and exciting products that were just released on the market, but you will not survive or prosper as a company unless you are in direct contact with your customers and run an honest business.