There is news today that Sprint has made a massive leap forward in its customer care operation and has gone from being a real laggard in this area to being top dog in the US - at least on one key metric: wait time before reaching a human being (once through the IVR and into the call center queue). According to a survey from Pali Research (irritatingly, registration required for that link - but a good summary here):

We recently concluded our 6^th survey of wireless customer care response times and Sprint has leapt to the best performance of its peers from the worst in our first survey 2.5 years ago… Sprint’s survey results of 91% in Q3 2008 soundly beat its peers:  AT&T Wireless - 33%, T-Mobile - 43%, and Verizon - 85%. 

I think this is incredibly impressive - Sprint has hardly been a paragon of good performance in the wirelessarena lately, and has had one or two other major things to worry about recently too. But it made customer care a major focus area when Dan Hesse took over (see this earlier post) and the results are kicking in. This is one timely demonstration of the point that I made in my previous post on the topic of customer care at telcos, that fundamentals need to improve dramatically in this area. Kudos to Sprint for fixing this key element of customer service so quickly.

Having said that, this is just one metric. It doesn’t measure customer satisfaction, first call resolution, or the volume of calls to care in the first place (another area where Sprint was until recently also the laggard among its peers) - it only measures time to answer - admittedly, an important element but also an easy one to fix if enough resources and money are thrown at the problem. I’ll be watching with interest as other surveys and reports on the other elements of telco customer care are released in the coming months to see if Sprint’s efforts in those other areas have paid off too.