This afternoon, Hotfoot Lori pulled her blog entry criticizing our company from the Sporting News website.

Thought your readers should know.

John Taylor

I wanted to update you and your readers to the results of our investigation into this customer’s complaints with Sprint Nextel.

The link below is to a blog post on the Kansas City Star website earlier today (Jul 16, 2008.) I hope your readers find it useful.

I would contend that the title of your original post criticizing Sprint deserves some editing.

Within hours of the complaint being posted on the Sportingnews.com website last Friday, I personally apologized to the customer and offered to help.

On Saturday morning I contacted you to discuss how Sprint was responding.

We conducted our investigation over the weekend and concluded it on Tuesday afternoon.

On Tuesday evening I updated Sprint customers and employees on our Buzzaboutwireless.com site, I also spoke to the Kansas City Star on Tuesday. There update is below.

Did Sprint handle this situation perfectly? No, we made a mistake in our initial contact with this customer. But we quickly acknowledged our mistake, we investigated the customer’s claim and and communicated the results of the investigation with the customer and we updated other interested parties to the extent we could given our company’s privacy policies and Federal privacy laws. (These policies are in place to protect consumers like you and me.)

But given all of our efforts, I hope you will see fit to update your readers.

Sincerely,

John Taylor / john.b.taylor@sprint.com /
Sprint Nextel Corp. / sprint.com/mediarelations

Follow me on Twitter @jbtaylor

http://sprintconnection.kansascity.com/?q=node/700

Hotfoot Lori – Sprint strikes back

When is 4 cents not really 4 cents?

When it’s an accounting placekeeper.

(cue laughs)

Okay, so as one-liners go, that’s about as funny as the federal deficit.

But it does provide something of a clue about the strange case of Hotfoot Lori.

To bring you up to speed, Hotfoot Lori is a “community blogger” who writes on the Sporting News and Fox Sports Web sites. Last week, she wrote a self-described rant about Sprint headlined “Sprint/Nextel … I Hope You Go Bankrupt!” Google News picked up her blog item.

Last Friday, we recounted that rant. We noted that Hotfoot said she was considering signing up for Sprint service, but grew angry after being told by a customer service rep that the order couldn’t be processed until she paid a back balance of 4 cents.

Hotfoot said she was told she had to visit a store to pay the balance, and couldn’t add it to her new account. She said she didn’t want to waste the gas driving to a store. The bottom line, Hotfoot said she signed another contract with her old wireless company.

Hotfoot’s account was met with skepticism by some Sprint Connection readers, anger at Sprint by others.

Not surprisingly, Sprint reached out to Hotfoot quickly. Within hours, Sprint PR guy John Taylor wrote a comment on her blog offering to help.

In an e-mail to The Star, Hotfoot said a Sprint representative from corporate backed up her story after she exchanged e-mails with Taylor.

“I have been contacted by a lady from the Sprint executive office,” Hotfoot said. “She apologized, took some information from me, the order information and with whom I spoke last week.

“She looked up my information and found that there is an old account with a four cent balance. She also stated that this should have never happened to me.”

Hotfoot also told her story in her own words in a comment on Sprint connection.

Now, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s (at least part) of the rest of the story.

Again not surprisingly, the Hotfoot conundrum drew something of an investigation within Sprint. Apparently, Hotfoot owes more than 4 cents.

“Ms. Norton was not turned away because she owed 4 cents,” Taylor said of Hotfoot.

Taylor said the 4 cents was only a representative figure for an old balance still due, one larger than 4 cents. He described it as a placekeeper left there for accounting reasons.

Here’s the approved by lawyers version.

“As our company has grown over the years through acquisitions and mergers, we’ve converted account records into new billing systems on several occasions. Occasionally, an account will appear in our current billing system with an extremely small balance that serves as a ‘placeholder’ figure,” Taylor said in an e-mail.

“This placeholder figure is supported by additional information and systems, which reflect a previous past due account balance with the company and whether the account is in collections or has been written off as bad debt. It’s important to note that this situation only applies to a handful of accounts with Sprint or other wireless carriers that we have acquired over the years,” Taylor said.

“As with any other company, it’s Sprint’s policy that former customers with outstanding balances would need to settle those obligations before we could establish a new line of service.”

Again, we’re not sure what to make of all this. Your thoughts?

As we discussed this morning, on behalf of Sprint, I reached out to the NASCAR blogger, “Hotfoot Lori”, within hours of her original post.

She is in contact with us and I hope we can resolve this to her satisfaction by early next week. Privacy laws and Sprint’s own privacy regulations, which are in place to protect our customers, prevent me from sharing more details.

As I indicated to you, her experience is not what we want for current or future customers and certainly not for NASCAR fans — we are very proud of our NASCAR sponsorship.

We are working very hard to improve the experience our customers have at Sprint. Our internal metrics are showing that we are doing a better job of resolving complaints. Customer satisfaction is rising, but we recognize we still have work to do.

I encourage your readers — whether they are customers of Sprint or not — to visit http://www.buzzaboutwireless.com to learn more about what we are doing to improve. It’s also the best place to get the first news from Sprint about new phones and wireless applications coming to market.

Thanks,

John Taylor
Public Affairs
Sprint Nextel Corp.