Sprint.com is Cornerstone of Customer Experience Efforts

Online Community, Ratings & Reviews, and More to Jumpstart Broader Dialogue with Customers.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan.-- Dan Hesse recently declared Sprint (NYSE:S) a “new and different company,” and Sprint.com -- one of the 200 most visited Web sites according to a recent study1 -- is a prime example. Sprint.com is creating a user experience that is not only informative but also highly interactive with the opportunity for users to provide direct feedback to the company. Sprint’s online enhancements are improving customer relationships and helping to move the dialogue beyond a typical stale corporate Web site to one that engages visitors, encourages peer-to-peer communication, and improves the overall customer experience.

Enhancements to sprint.com across community, support, shopping and self service are taking place in phases throughout 2009 and 2010. This investment highlights a significant shift in the way Sprint interacts with customers and uses their feedback to improve the customer experience. If customers don’t like something, they have the power to do something about it, and we’re listening.

Last month, in an effort to become even more transparent, Sprint moved its online social networking community of more than 50,000 registered contributors, www.buzzaboutwireless.com, directly onto the company’s corporate Web site. Here, users interact with each other and Sprint employees in open forum discussions about products, services and all things wireless. In addition, Sprint customer care representatives are engaging customers right on the community site to help answer questions and solve problems. Since this enhancement to the site in August, traffic volumes to the new community experience have nearly doubled. The community link can be found directly on the Sprint.com homepage.
More than 25,000 peer-to-peer customer generated Ratings & Reviews across 126 devices are now integrated into the Sprint shopping experience found at www.sprint.com/phones, where honest and candid feedback about Sprint devices and products from customers helps others make better buying decisions. This section will soon include links to third party expert product reviews to accompany customers’ ratings and reviews.
“Over the last three years we have found an incredible depth of passion and insight from the users of the community,” said Mike Cooley, Sprint’s vice president of sprint.com. “We’re not just a place people go to conduct a transaction and have a one-way dialogue. Sprint.com is a place focused on driving action with the intention of helping us build better relationships with our customers. We have a desire to listen and learn from the users of the online community, and in turn provide a way for people to converse with our employees and other customers, and gain access to peer-generated information about Sprint products. More importantly we want to give customers more control over their Sprint experience.”

Sprint is taking its commitment to embrace a two-way dialogue with customers seriously. In a recent, well-publicized campaign to “Take Back the Beep” in the New York Times, about how to streamline the voice mail instructions message in an effort to help users save money and use fewer minutes, Sprint responded. The company created a customer forum at www.sprint.com/takebackthebeep dedicated to the issue. It was an opportunity to ask customers to share their thoughts and ideas as well as to educate customers on how to turn off the voice mail prompts entirely.

Future enhancements to Sprint.com will be announced in the coming months and over the next year.

Sprint wants to hear from you. Tell us what you think about Sprint’s strategy to make Sprint.com both an informative and interactive destination, as well as a way to further enhance the customer experience at www.sprint.com/webtalk.

ABOUT SPRINT NEXTEL

Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving almost 49 million customers at the end of the second quarter of 2009; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. The company’s customer-focused strategy has led to improved first call resolution and customer care satisfaction scores. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.