Somebody is finally taking my advice.
About eight years ago I was working for a major PC manufacturer, doing analysis on customer support patterns and costs. The results I came up with were not surprising. 80% of our support costs were due to about 20% of our customers. And worst 1% were almost 30% of the total cost. For the most part, these were not people whose PCs were not working properly. Many of them were people who just did not want to be bothered with learning, who would call in to ask the same questions about basic operations day after day. Some of them felt that our customer service people were there to provide free tutorials for hours each week. A few of them -- like a priest in a remote parish who called us 3-4 times a day -- were clearly just lonely and looking for somebody to talk to.
At the time I had other suggestions too. It was pretty easy to identify that the biggest problem customers tended to have purchased their products from certain retailers, and usually at certain times of the year. So I recommendded, among other thing, that we reconsider doing things like day-after-Thanksgiving specials at Wal-Mart, or at the very least do some further analysis, to attempt to determine if the long-term value of the new customers acquired could ever justify the cost of getting them up to speed on their intitial purchases, and whether in fact they ever would come up to speed and be satisfied with the product.
For those people who were truly at the extreme -- the ones who were five or six standard deviations away from the norm -- my recommendation was simple: Repurchase their PCs and all accessories from them at the original MSRP (probably less than they paid at retail), and even provide them an extra $100 gift card which they could use to buy a competing product. Getting rid of that small number of people would be worth the money.
So yesterday's news about Sprint Wireless did not surprise me in the least.
For those of you who missed it, Sprint has decided to drop about 1200 of their $53m customers. These are customers who have been calling in on average 25 times or more each month to get some problem or another resolved. At a typical call center cost of $2-3 per minute of assistance, those are pretty expensive customers.
Don't get me wrong. Many, if not all, cellphone companies suck. They force you into contracts you don't want and features you don't need just in order to get a phone at a price that represents "only" a margin of a few hundred percent above the tiny cost of manufacture. They design their networks to prevent you from using a phone bought from a third party, and "lock" their phones so you can't use them with anybody else's network. The competitive third-party phone markets that exist everywhere else in the world are locked out of the US as a result. They make no guarantees of coverage, and if they happen to decide to re-orient their cells in your area so that you're cut off, you have no recourse other than to pay a termination fee and switch providers. Lots of people have legitimate beefs with cellphone companies.
But I suspect even most of those people aren't calling in every day for months at a time.
In my experience, the people calling every day fall into a few key categories, none of whom you want as customers:
- The ones with an axe to grind. These are people who are pissed for some reason or another and won't be happy until they see you bankrupt and out of business. You may not even be the thing they are really pissed off about, just a convenient target. They are like the guy who sued his drycleaner for millions of dollars over a pair of lost pants. The pants, in his case, were probably incidental to the fact that he apparently had a lot going wrong in his life at the time and decided to take it out on what he perceived to be an easy target. (I won't even get into the racial overtones of this, which are obvious to anybody who witnessed the animosity between Korean immigrants and African Americans that literally blew up in flames during the LA riots.)
- The ones who can't use your product and never will. Lets face it, complex devices are not for everybody. I make sure that my mom gets the simplest cellphone possible, because I don't want to have to help her for hours at a time. I do the same for her with PCs. I'm slowly moving her to web-based apps, with the intention, in time, of having her need very little other than an internet browser for everything she does. Still, there are people like her who nonetheless get suckered into expensive and feature-laden cellphones, or who receive the latest media-rich PCs as gifts from their kids. And there are people who end up with devices they don't even know why they need them, but want to be told how to use them anyway. GM doesn't teach you how to drive. There are technology-equivalents of "drivers ed" all around the country at schools and community colleges. My mom took one. Dumping that responsibility on manufacturers and service providers is as unfair as it would be to ask your car dealer to teach you how to drive.
- The ones who just like to talk. Like the priest who used to call daily for "help" with his PC, or the elderly Nyborgs in Glengarry Glen Ross
, who just liked to talk to salesmen.
- The ones who are trying to rip you off. Sad to say it, but they exist too. They will call in and demand all sorts of compensation for all sorts of problems they've had that they claim are your fault. They are the ones who "didn't realize" that the free six months of AOL would only last for six months and that they would be billed every month after that. The ones who "should have been told" that unlimited national calling on their cellphones doesn't include international calls. The ones who want credits for the minutes they used up by leaving a phone with an unlocked keypad in their back pocket or purse and inadverently dialing a bunch of random numbers. Every day. The ones who download random games from the internet, get their PC infected and then blame the manufacturer. Repeatedly, despite what happened last time. For many of these people, every charge is just another game to be played, another thing that they need to come up with an excuse for making somebody else pay for.
For all these types, Herb Kelleher's response is appropriate: "Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb"
