Sprint's iDEN Network Shuts Down Tonight
original version, submitted Jun 29, 2013, 9:45 AM:
Good Riddance To Worst Business Merger Of All Time!
Talk about two totally incompatible offerings.
Hesse made the best of what imcompetent predecessor left him with.
Sprint stood to gain spectrum, assets of a so called competitor, a loyal customer base (many iDen die hards jumped ship at the time), and a billing system as their prior system was being leased (Premier and P2K) from Covergys/IBM so they moved to a fixer upper system CSM and places a skin over it known as SView (Sprint's Vision is Enterprise Wide) sounds like a bad acronym for an Austin Powers villain and only recently after finally listening they have launched a NEW billing system (2012) which is still just ANOTHER skin over CSM (one of Legacy Nextel spoils). This was one of the MANY challenges of Sprint Care reps during conversion and the in flight process. A direct result of the Nextel merger becase of this many care channels found themselves STILL placing customers on hold for idefinite periods, beating their heads into their desk wondering why the most common of basic task were seemingly monumentally difficult. With team leaders and managers leaning all too heavily on a handfull of sekf proclaimed "subject matter experts" (reps who stayed awake during the transition training) to do support for those whom did not pay attention.
One of the quirks of the billing system is the soft phone application and its relationship with their third party Survey company Advantis. If youre calling any Care channel and your account info auto populates for the rep in that instance the rep KNOWS you will be surveyed for customer satisfaction UNLESS they are able to transfer you to to a supervisor or another department. Reps,team leads managers, site directors and even higher up are aware of this quirk. Reps and team leads alike will frantically find away to transfer unhappy campers away, somewhere anywhere as long as that call doesn't terminate at the initial reps desk This is done to save that Reps monthly bonus and yhe TL's bonus which is HEAVILY waited on survey results one BAD survey could cost a rep hundreds of dollars for up to 3 months until the survey drops off weather or not the bad survey was warranted or not. Differece being callers who have theor dad pop up are treated like "gold* and if they cant be satisfied or yhe rep has a bad feeling about the survey then the caller is transferred to a supervisor to so called "confirm satisfaction" but the real reason is to keep that customer's voice from being heard. If you dont pop up with your info then you do not get treated as well as those who do pop up with all information via this soft phone app.
I guess there is no harm in this, Sprint will pay out bonus for skewed numbers to their employees no harm. Sprint will report so called impartial inflated CSAT and Net Promoter Scores from an outside 3rd party (Advantis) which contributes to Sprint's street value that is if the SEC cares. Just as long as the managers, site directors, and on up the chain plead ignorace of this "rumor" stick their fingers in their ears singing la la la la la and SAY "treat all callers the same" (which why would they have to reinforce this if there was no notable difference in callers) everything will be alright for now.
Dont get me wrong, I like Sprint a lot. They have a solid product at a fair market price and reasonably friendly hard working people on their front lines. They are the "good guys" as they tout for the MOST part. They wont aknowledge this glitch. But why would a tenured manager (not me) be termed for survey avoidance and system manipulation for having a rep transfer an autopop caller to a helpdesk that was not at her desk for confirmation of satisfaction.
edited Jun 29, 2013, 10:16 AM to the current version:
Farwell Beep Beep
I am so glad that the days of listening to people beeping in walmart at full volume has come to a close