Sprint-Nextel Corp. is making strides in customer loyalty, it would like you to know.
"Providing an outstanding customer experience is a multi-year journey," Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO, told an audience at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum in New York on Wednesday. "We have made a lot of progress over the past two years, and we appreciate the external recognition we have been receiving for these improvements, but we are far from satisfied."
That external recognition comes in the form of making the biggest improvement in the customer experience of any wireless carrier, according to an independent survey conducted by Forrester Research.
The Forrester survey asked more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies and scores them in three key areas: "meets needs," "easy to work with" and the rather nebulous "enjoyability." Sprint's overall rating jumped 15 percentage points since the last survey. Here’s the kicker: its competitors improved at most 1 percent. Sprint's higher rating was largely driven by improvements in its "easy to work with" score.
Similar results were to be had in the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released in May. Sprint is the most improved company in customer satisfaction, across all industries, over the last two years, according to its results.
Terming the steps Sprint undertook to improve its customer experience "the Magnificent Seven," Hesse detailed for the Forrester conference participants the process used to align the company and its employees around this goal: Customers want simplicity and they want value, so Sprint introduced offers into the marketplace with unprecedented simplicity and value, like the all-inclusive Simply Everything and Any Mobile, Anytime rate plans, and Sprint's "Ready Now" device set-up and education service. All were brought to market as the company continually improved its customer satisfaction and first-call resolution metrics, now having achieved improvements for nine consecutive quarters. With these improvements made, Sprint launched the innovative Sprint Free Guarantee, which encourages customers to give the company a try by offering the industry's only money-back guarantee.
