Since Sprint and Nextel merged three years ago, the deal has turned into something of a fiasco, with the company's stock down 66% since the agreement was struck. Poor service is a central reason. After the merger, unhappy customers defected in droves, and profits ev

aporated.

The toll on Sprint's reputation has been dear. The company has ranked last among the country's five major wireless carriers in customer service every year since the merger in 2005, according to annual surveys by J.D. Power & Associates.

An important component of the effort was importing the quantitative management approach of Sprint to Nextel. While some of the new metrics worked well, others had detrimental effects, former employees and executives say. In particular, call centers began to be measured and viewed primarily as cost centers, rather than opportunities for strategic advantage. Customer service ended up a secondary priority, say former executives.

The new policies hurt Sprint's ability to build its customer base. In the third quarter of 2007, churn stayed high, and Sprint saw its subscriber numbers remain flat, at 54 million, while rivals AT&T and Verizon added millions.

It is clear from the article as well as from my personal experience of being an ex-Sprint customer, that the company overlooked some basic principals of a customer focused enterprise. For our readers, I am sharing some key personal takeaways that a good reminder for what to look for when you are thinking about your own organization.

1. Service is the primary differentiator in a commodity market: Doesn't matter how you look at it, the fact is that certain segments of the communications industry have become commodities. The primary differentiator between one service provider and another is price, equipment and service. With little difference left in pricing for most consumer usage patterns, the decision to stay with a company is heavily dependent on service. When an organization finds itself in this situation, they need to realize this fact as early as possible in order to move towards differentiation through service.


2. The experience is the brand: The brand of an organization is the experience that it delivers to its customers, employees and partners. When that experience degrades, the brand value degrades.


3. Employee focus drives customer focus: A focus on Employees is critical in providing good customer service and the treatment of the call center employees in the article shows anything but an employee focused organization.


4. Customer provide the best feedback on your performance: There is more to learn from customers than any other form of analysis. If customers are leaving you, which can be clearly seen from churn numbers, then you are either not listening or not doing anything about it.


5. Service quality is perceived quality: Companies try to measure the quality of service by many metrics including CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), Service Levels, First Call Resolution and other metrics. In their drive to ONLY manage by what they can measure, a lot of organization forget that at the end of the day, a significant portion of service quality is dependent on the perceived quality – which is a moving target and needs a combination of methods to monitor and manage.


6. Don’t forget other interaction channels: As the customer experience is crucial to building a positive service experience, organizations need to make sure that they do not overlook the non call center interactions – primarily online and face-to-face. A simple way to remember this is to remember click-talk-walk to make sure that you are considering all the interaction channels when defining, measuring and improving customer interaction experience.


7. Avoid “Metrics Madness”: With the amount of press and vendor push on using business intelligence and operational analytics platforms to manage businesses, a number of organizations are jumping onto the bandwagon to start managing by numbers. They are going “metrics mad”. Basically, a lot of organizations are starting to measure “something” to feel that they are back in control of their operations and strategy. Very few have gone through the thought process of how the metrics that are used to manage help the organization in achieving their strategic objectives. This leads to measuring for the sake of measuring without any clear benefit, sometimes even detrimental. ME