It seems to be the motto of Sprint together with Nextel. Spend as much as you can on getting new customers while overlooking those customers you do have. Sprint’s customer support is notoriously the worst support of all the cellular telephone companies. Those of you who read the USA Today newspaper might have noticed in the middle of the sports page which reported on the upcoming NCAA Basketball tournament that there was a huge yellow ad in the middle.
In fact it was a one page monster of an ad that had to of cost a fortune. I’m not sure how much it really did cost but trust me when I say a fortune. This is just another example of Sprint spending millions of dollars on advertising and not on existing customers. I was recently in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii and talked with store owner who had to get rid of his sprint contract because sprint said and I quote “We don’t have enough customers over there to necessitate a new phone tower.” Well how do expect to get enough customers if you don’t have enough towers to support their phones.
I know, why not advertise the crap out of all these crappy phones and see if you can’t get some idiots (myself included) to buy a phone be cornered into a contract and stuck before they know it. Great idea.
I realize if you own stock in this wonderful company advertising is a big part of increasing worth of a service company. But don’t you need to keep customers so they can pay you and you can make money. Advertising makes money leave while keeping customers makes money stay.
Hmmm. Sprint still isn’t all that good.