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The knock on Sprint in the middle of the country for a long time was that the signal was fine so long as you were in a big city or near an Interstate, but as soon as you left the main road you were out of luck. That has improved a great deal and, with the current plans, roaming is not a big deal in any case. But I still hear people say they would not go with Sprint because they are afraid they might find themselves without a signal.
As to CS, Sprint did have a serious CS problem for a while. Their first line people were not trained very well and also not treated well by Sprint. I represented a CS person on an employment issue with Sprint and also had two friends that were first line CS people for a while. They gave them a three-ringed binder to read overnight and then put them on the phones. What is more, if the CS person did not sell enough add-on's to customers calling in, they would be let go. They worked long-hours in unpleasant conditions with the goal to sell more stuff not to help customers. Needless to say there was a lot of turnover which made CS even worse. (remember when you would always get the sales-pitch about special deals on home service before they spun off Embarq?)
To top it all off, Sprint, before the era of cheap pre-paid or pay-as-you go phones, was the only place some people could get a phone since they took credit risks when others wouldn't. That combined with the cheaper plans attracted the "low-end" customer for whom the annoying CS advise "try taking out your battery" might actually have been appropriate. Because CS people got so used to dealing with the low-enders that (combined with no training) made them pretty poor when dealing with a customer that actually knew something about their phone or their plan. It got to the point where I would just immediatly ask for a supervisor right away.
THEN they tried to outsourse CS to the other side of the ocean. That was a huge disaster as the people could not speak English but tried to pretend they were in the US (the scene in Slumdog Millionare nailed the old Sprint CS to a "T" except he spoke English a lot better than the Sprint people did)
Since CS was brought back in-house, it has not only improved, it is, IMO pretty darn good and a lot better than other companies I have had to deal with, but I'm sure there are many people out there with a bad taste in their mouths from the way it was.
Next, their commercials, especially compared to AT&T and Verison pretty much have sucked for a long time.
Lastly, in my circles of friends, family, co-workers and the like, the biggest killer for Sprint was the I-phone. Everybody's kids, wives and girlfriends wanted the I-Phone and nothing else. I-phones are simply the "cool" phone for people to have. I know a lot of people switched from Sprint to AT&T because of the I-Phone either for themelves or so their kids could have one.
I can tell you one thing that helped Sprint around here (but hurt the Sprint Stores) was having Best Buy carrying their phones with no mail-in rebate garbage. They were advertised well and, at least at our store, the BB people know the Sprint phones and plans quite well and do a very good job.
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