Aug. 29
2007
Update for: “Why it’s Okay to Turn Some Customers away”
- Comments: 4
I received an email today from Arizona State University’s business school (the one I attend). The email is from an organization within the business school called Knowledge. It is sent out to all students enrolled in the W.P. Carey school.
One of the topics in the email was about Sprint/Nextel essentially firing 1,000 of its worst customer’s! I thought the article and the exlplanation tied in really well to my post on the 80/20 rule entitled, “Why it’s Okay to Turn Some Customers away.”
Check it out!
No Phone for You! Sprint-Nextel Cuts Off High-Maintenance Customers
Awesome! I work at a Linux Help Desk and recently had to “fire” one of our frequent flyers. This was done because in 1 year he had ~500 support tickets for things that he had broken and wanted us to fix. He called roughly 3-4 times a week. He lied to us on several occasions and was caught in those lies. I think there comes a point where you just need to let people go. If someone doesn’t perform doing a job then you fire them. The same should be applied to customers who can’t pull their head out of their 4th point of contact. 1000 customers is nothing to Sprint..
That is great! I used to work for T-Mobile before landing a position in the IT industry and I can tell you that I wish I had the power to fire customers like that when I worked there. One customer in particular would get irate ever single time he came into the store to pay his bill. He would always pay with a check and with every check we have to write down the drivers license information to enter into our check verification machine. Everytime someone would ask for his license he would lose it. It got to the point where to told us that he was going to cancel service and I just looked at him and said “ok” thinking that would be awesome if you did that!
This is the same guy that if his checkbook were stolen and someone came in to purchase merchandise with his stolen checks and we didn’t get id, he’d be wondering why in the world we didn’t check.
I know the old adage that the customer is always right and I agree that in a lot of situations that’s the case. You have the please the people giving you money, but there is a breaking point to where even though the customer is bringing in money to your business, they are also taking away more money than they are giving you so that’s when it’s not good business on your part and something need to happen.
Sometimes it really takes courage to fire than to hire…
[...] I read a post in Josh Mullineaux’s blog, where he presented a very interesting article,No Phone for You! Sprint-Nextel Cuts Off [...]