Our trophy case in the Sprint main lobby continues to fill up, with the latest award coming from ATLANTIC-ACM, recognizing our customer service.
What’s nice about this award, the 2009 Business Connectivity Carrier Excellence Award for Customer Service, is that it isn’t just a rating from a leading research company, but it reflects ATLANTIC-ACM’s extensive surveys of business customers. Which means we really had to deliver, because as we all know, customers aren’t shy about their feelings when it comes to any unhappiness with customer service.
This is the third wave of recognition this year from ATLANTIC-ACM. Earlier this year, we took home the Global Wholesale Best in Class Award for Data Product Quality and then, later, three Best in Class Domestic Wholesale Awards for sales representatives, provisioning, and customer service.
As ATLANTIC-ACM pointed out, our business customers’ high opinions reflect the investment Sprint has made in serving customers well, both in terms of providing the IP-based and convergence technologies they need and in attending to their service needs.
A big part of this award-winning customer service is our approach to global customers. All customers with multinational networks are assigned their own account team, regardless of how large their international operations are, or how much market clout they have. Our competitors – most of whom aren’t taking home any ATLANTIC-ACM awards – only bestow account teams upon the largest global customers. In other words, they have a few first-class seats, and everybody else flies coach. For us, the whole plane is first class.
We do this because so many of these customers need extra attention. After all, the giant companies have IT and telecom people all over the world. Non-giant companies don’t have those kinds of resources, so they need the expertise a global account team can provide. The fact that we offer this expertise as part of the package clearly pays off in our customer service rankings.
There are other important elements too. For example, we assign a specialized design team and implementation project manager to determine the best technology mix and smooth the deployment. We also offer Compass, the portal through which customers can optimize and manage IP/MPLS networks with real-time status and performance statistics and get an amazingly comprehensive view of their network and ours. And our support centers around the world guarantee support anytime, in a variety of languages.
