Hope you had a good weekend! — Dan

The Phone Company That Hung Up On Its Customers

“Please listen carefully because our menu options have changed.” There are worse sentences in the English language, but not many. If you’ve heard this — and you certainly have — you know what you’re in for: an endless menu of choices in an automated “customer service” queue that not only fails to meet your specific needs but ensures that your agony will maximize before you finally utter whatever magic keypad combination required to get you to a real person who can help you with your real problem. And even then, you often need to restate everything you already entered into the system, and then…

I don’t need to belabor the point. Customer service hotlines are labyrinths and an experience that most of us would avoid if at all possible. But not all of us. There are people out there who — perhaps not happily — call customer service numbers over and over and over again.

But, as of 2007, they were no longer customers of phone company Sprint.

Before a corporate merger with T-Mobile in 2020, Sprint was one of the largest telecom companies in the United States. And like any other telecom company, particularly in the era of mobile phones, they had customers who needed support — figuring out bills, getting technical assistance, etc. So Sprint established a series of support centers that customers could call to get help and, often, to complain. Nothing new there — most big consumer companies do that. And when customers called in, Sprint tried to help them.

But on June 29, 2007, that attitude changed — at least, insofar as some of the biggest complainers were concerned. That day, Sprint sent out letters to those customers telling them thanks for their business, but, well, no thanks. Here’s what the letter said, per CNET:

Yep: Sprint fired their (annoying) customers.

That’s usually not good for business, but in this case, Sprint probably had a point. A company spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that “terminated subscribers called an average of 25 times a month [almost once per day!], a rate 40 times higher than average customers.” That was impacting Sprint’s ability to provide customer service to the normal complainers, and for that reason alone, it may have made sense for Sprint to drop these curmudgeons as customers. But there may have been even more reason. Consumerist asked one of their sources what drove the decision, and concluded that “the terminated customers were scamming Sprint, calling in again and again, just to get free service credits.” Some had been receiving phone service for years without paying a dime — they had amassed so many credits that it covered their bills and then some.

But that said, there’s reason to believe that at least some of the canceled customers were wrongfully snared by this operation. For example, one such customer (named Rene) shared some of her Sprint correspondences with ZDNet, outlining how the company overcharged her by about $30. From those emails, it seemed like her complaints to the telecom giant were warranted. So why did she make so many phone calls? “The vast majority of my calls were to fix errors Sprint made. Most of the calls were transferred numerous times, disconnected (forcing me to call back) or they told me to call a different number. That’s why the actual [number of calls] was so high.”

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More About Cell Phones

Today’s Bonus fact: If you’re at the gas station refueling your car, there’s a good chance see a sign saying that you shouldn’t use your cell phone because it can cause a spark that could ignite the gas, and that’d be bad. But that’s almost certainly not true. As Snopes notes, “According to some experts, there is a danger that using a mobile phone near gas pumps could touch off an explosion, but not only have we found no real-life instances of such an explosion occurring, we don't know anyone who has demonstrated experimentally that it's even possible (including the folks at The Discovery Channel's Mythbusters program).” But please, don’t test this — it’s not worth it. The phone can wait.

From the Archives: Feeling Buzzed: Ever think your phone is in your pocket, vibrating, even though your phone isn’t even in your pocket? You’re not alone.

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And thanks! — Dan