The intense competition in the long-distance industry has forced telephone service providers to fight to retain their customers, who are bombarded daily with ads full of reasons to switch carriers. One long-distance company, U S Sprint, knows that keeping customers satisfied is one of the best ways to stop that defection. The company has maintained an ongoing customer satisfaction measurement program for three years, interviewing nearly 50,000 customers annually.


Prior to beginning its satisfaction tracking program in January of 1988, Sprint conducted focus groups with its various residential and business customer segments to make sure the program would measure service attributes that were important to customers. That information was used to construct the telephone surveys which sample the opinions of 4,000 Sprint customers each month. The surveys (administered by Indianapolis-based Walker: DataSource), ask residential and business customers to assess Sprint's service in two areas.

First, a random sample of customers is contacted and asked about their satisfaction with on-going service in areas such as the quality of transmission and billing. Second, the program follows up with Sprint users who have recently called customer service, to get their reactions to the Sprint customer service personnel. In addition, customers who have had a repair or new service installed are contacted to gauge their satisfaction.

Continuously monitor

Dennis Bums, director of market research, U S Sprint, says that one of the ways the research data is used is to continuously monitor the performance of the Sprint customer service function. "We measure satisfaction with service representatives, their knowledge and understanding of problems. We ask about the customer's perception of how quickly the call (to customer service) was answered, along with an overall rating of the quality of the handling of the call. From that we can identify areas where we should be putting more resources. If customers express concern about how quickly the calls are answered, we make sure that we do a better job of staffing up and anticipating when the heavy loads are going to be.

"We have some very elaborate procedures in training customer service reps how to handle various types of calls and the proper way to deal with customers in a courteous manner. If there is any slippage in those areas, we know we have to emphasize them with our service reps. Those are the kinds of things that allow us to tailor our training programs and reinforce some of the concepts we've taught our people."

Maintain consistency

Because the program is a tracking system, Bums says the questionnaires change very little. "We try very hard to maintain consistency in the sampling process and questionnaires so that we can have comparability. We do make changes, but we do so because we think we can improve the measurement enough that we're willing to give up the historical comparison. We'll add a question here or there so that we learn something new that we hadn't thought of before, but we resist modifying the procedures unless it's for a good reason.

"The power of the system comes from being able to compare the results from month to month, quarter to quarter, and year to year, to make sure that we're improving, by how much and in what areas. By tracking customer satisfaction, you set goals for yourself as a company. Our organization has been very good at establishing goals at the beginning of the year and working toward achieving them, in terms of the evaluations from our customers. That process begins to change the way that everybody thinks about their job. They really start thinking about what it is the customer wants. If you get the whole organization thinking that way you can make some fundamental changes that are very beneficial to the company in the long term."

Action comment

Like many similar programs, Sprint's customer satisfaction program incorporates an action comment procedure, which allows the company to respond directly to specific customer complaints. If, during the course of a customer interview, a Walker: Research interviewer learns that a customer is particularly upset or concerned about a service problem, he or she will fill out an action comment form which contains the customer's name and phone number and a description of their problem.

What sets the U S Sprint action comment procedure apart from others is the speed with which the company is able to respond to customers. The action comments are sent electronically to Sprint early each business day, and once in the Sprint computer system, they are distributed to the proper departments for handling.

"Walker collects these action comments and each morning they electronically transmit them to us," Burns says. "An analyst in the market research department then reads the action comments and decides who should respond to each particular customer's concern. Our analyst doesn't have to key the comments in or reproduce them, all she does is put a routing command into the system and it automatically sends it to the right area for action. If it has to do with a billing problem, she'll route it to our billing people, if it has to do with a particular product, she'll route it to one of our marketing people."

That person then appends to the message a description of the action taken to answer the customer's needs or questions and returns the "form" to the marketing research department.

"Each of these communications is time stamped so we know how long it took for people to follow-up and what was done. My department puts together a tabulation of the action comments, how many were received, how quickly they acted on, and the types of action comments we're observing."

Closing the loop

The most important part of the process, Burns says, is that the company "closes the loop" and responds to the customer. "The interviewer doesn't make any promises to the customer, other than the fact that they'll pass the comment on to Sprint, but we'll usually contact them within two days. With the automated action comment procedure, we're able to resolve problems and do it in a way that in many cases surprises and pleases customers. So what starts out as a negative situation turns into a positive one. We make sure that none of the comments fall through the cracks, and that they get resolved. And if there are particular problems that keep coming up, we make sure that we work to solve them once and for all."

Mike Huser, senior account executive with Walker: Customer Satisfaction Measurements, says that following-up is important, because telling the customer that his or her comments will be forwarded sets up expectations.

"Just the fact that we're taking an action comment means that the account may be in jeopardy to some degree. If someone is upset, we like to make the client aware as soon as possible so that they can rectify the situation. The quicker you can follow-up, the easier it is to effect a recovery."

Burns says that the volume of complaints handled in the action comment procedure isn't much when compared to the overall Sprint customer base, but it offers an excellent way to let customers know that the company cares about their opinions.

"We may deal with a hundred customers through this system over the course of a month, which, given the fact that we have millions of customers, is not a lot. But it is something that I would definitely recommend to a company that is thinking about putting together a customer satisfaction measurement scheme."