For the first quarter of 2007, it reported a loss of 220,000 post-paid monthly subscribers–customers who pay monthly. This was the third quarter in a row the company had a substantial loss of these types of customers. The company has consistently had one of the worst churn rates in the wireless industry. At the end of the first quarter of 2007, Sprint reported a churn rate of 2.7 percent.

After the news broke about customer terminations, more and more people are deserting the company . I think it was just a bad decisions considering the fact, the cost of acquiring a wireless customer is said to be in the region of $250- $ 300 .

When it comes to Telecom and wireless companies, they are some of the most profitable . ( atleast in the US ) In the us , all post paid customers HAS to fall under a monthly plan and a yearly contract. Sprint and Cingular contracts are generally a 2 year contract and if the customer decided to leave they have to pay an early termination fee of more than $200 . The lowest monthly ( voice only ) plan you can find will be a $ 39.00 plan ( and these companies charge you a 25% taxes and other fees per month ) which including taxes will be about $ 50 per month. A customer has “x” number of any time minutes a month and has to pay 40cents per minute , if they exceed. So there is no business , that is as profitable than the cell phone business. You have guaranteed revenues based on paying customers. People normally do not default on their cell phone bills, if a cell phone company blacklists a customer, most other companies will not touch the customer either.
In some cases (like Cingular ) companies have exclusive tie ups with equipment makers, in the case of the Iphone , the company sold exclusively through Cingular and customers who bought the Iphone have to choose from a plan that starts at $ 70 ( including taxes ) per MONTH for TWO years. In such a case, everything and every customer is profitable, it just comes down to percentages.

Yep! I am talking about the operator you refered.

It is not about the problem of whether the call terminates at a live operator or an automated system, either ways there is a loss of network bandwidth, which sometimes is quite expensive.

My point is this, any organization’s customer can be categorized into four distinct groups.

A) Profitable
B) Potentially Profitable
C) Currently Value Neutral
D) Bleeders

If the customer chocking the network by raising stupid issues happened to be from Bleeders category, in my opinion, its imperative a threshold is set and if the customer happen to violate it, send him a warning note.

I saw this horrible video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clsxNj7JIWI) in YouTube a few days ago, please watch it without worrying about the content/subject presented. Notice what happens at the end of the video. Finish watching the video and resume reading on..

If such treatments were to be applied on customers that often raise tickets or complains about not-so-important issues all the time, a similar approach from the video should be embraced, and its surely worth an attempt.