Well, depends on who you ask.  If you talk to employees, they tell you that Sprint has never recovered from the customer service issues of 5-10 years ago when they were still Sprint PCS.  It’s a negatvie connotation which was slapped on the company because of a few too many rotten surveys, is it fair? Well, the context of a survey is generally fair and people respond based on experience, and sadly the experience was not good for thousands of Sprint customers.  Even more damaging, news spread that Sprint was intentionally dropping certain “problem” subscribers because they could never be made happy.  Basically, people who bitched too much were influenced to take a hike!

I don’t care of this was the truth or not, the facts are that Sprint is losing customers while the other carriers still flourish.   I don’t even think it comes down to who has the better phones or better service, it has to be a mindset that one carrier is good and another is not good.  

Sprint does a more than adequate job of pimping their name around, ownership of the NASCAR trophy, constant advertising on popular web outlets like Yahoo,  a barrage of commercials in prime time slots, naming rights to halftime shows on major networks.   But something is still not clicking with the general public.

How can a company that seemingly offers quality phones like the Palm Pre, Blackberry, LG, and Samsung still not make the money?  They market great calling plans like call anywhere anytime to anyone , and they have very large name recognition…but still lose out to the other carriers? 

Verizon has been dogged for not offering enough variations of mobile devices to it’s subscribers but yet still experiences record growth quarter after quarter.  Investors predict that for every ten customers Verizon adds, Sprint loses one.

The news never seems to favor Sprint, just recently JD Power announced results from PC Magazine surveys of the wireless carriers.  

Here’s what PC Mag had to say about Sprint’s results:

“Of the other major carriers, Sprint did a little better than last year and AT&T did a little worse, but both remain at the bottom with significantly worse than average (SWA) scores.” …

“Perpetual cellar-dweller Sprint has improved somewhat on all measures since 2008, but the company clearly still has a ways to go, especially with tech support, which readers gave a dreary 6.1 rating.”

In addition, talks of a Sprint takeover or partnership with Deutsche Telekom AG have been swirling over the wireless wires.  Sprint is a hometown company that sadly, I don’t even use as my own wireless carrier.  I can’t even explain it, it’s like sub consciously I buy into the negative hype.  I only had Sprint service for  two years and never had an issue, why did I change?  Not sure.   I recently spent time with friends in the mountains of Colorado and we all joked how one buddy’s phone worked and the others sucked.

The one’s that sucked were ATT, the phone that had a high altitude signal was Verizon, so what do I do, I switched to Verizon.   I also felt Verizon offered more affordable plans and replacement incentives then ATT…hell I don’t know, they all have their positives and negatives.   It all comes down to personal preference and experience, and it seems the Sprint experience has left a bitter taste in the mouths of too many wireless users.

Any truth to this?