Sprint Drops Customers Over Excessive Inquiries

theodp writes "The WSJ confirms earlier reports that Sprint Nextel is terminating the contracts of subscribers who call customer service too much (registration required). The 1,000 or so terminated subscribers called an average of 25 times a month — 40x times higher than average — according to a company spokeswoman, who also noted that a large number of calls from these customers were related to billing issues."

wow

guess its one way to get out of a crappy contract with a crappy company...

wait... am i first to post! hell yes sppp

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If only I'd know that a month ago... I'd have saved $200. Still worth the money though. Text messages taking over a day to arrive? Most incoming calls sent direct to voice mail? No thanks.

Disclaimer: Yes, I'm aware my experience may not be typical.

Re:wow

Thats because Sprint uses trucks instead of tubes.

Hmmm... How could we sink the company?

Before you laugh, this action was the result of intense research by the managers of Sprint. They thought, "How can we get ourselves on Reddit and Digg and Slashdot as a mean, ugly company, without paying advertising costs?" And they found an answer!

40x more than average...

This is precisely why I left Sprint early this year. Doing simple math, if they say that people who call 25 times a month are doing so 40 times more than usual, that works out to 0.625 times per month, or about eight times a year. EIGHT times a year. I'm sorry, but that's crappy service if your customers have a 67% chance of calling about a given bill. Not once have I ever called about my DSL bill, or my cable bill. I've only called my credit card company once. Yet, calling Sprint was an almost monthly affair.

Granted I know there's assholes who have nothing better to do but call customer support all day long. You get these people in any industry. However, I would consider myself an "average" Sprint customer. According to my records, I called them 46 times over the course of my 5.5 year history with them. It was always stupid stuff, usually no more than $0.50 but it's the principle of the thing. I specifically set both phones on the line to never roam and use Sprint Only. Yet, every few weeks the setting would silently revert to Strongest Signal. A couple of times I got charged roaming AND long distance to check my voicemail while in my home city. I would accept that maybe I screwed up and made a roaming call, but by Sprint's own admission, calling from the same city in which my voice mail is located should never be a long distance call. Fuck you, build a better system.

Before we had a text messaging plan I'd get random text spam sent to my phone. Each time I followed the CSR's advice and deleted it before it was opened. Still got charged...after a few calls it was discovered that the "delete without opening" trick only works for text messages sent from other Sprint customers. Messages from the web are automatically billed, regardless of whether you open them. Fuck you, build a better system.

Then we did get text messaging and my daughter got charged for 15 International text messages one month. The first CSR knew right away what the problem was - the Sprint computer thought all text messages were international for about a week or so. Credits were being automatically issued. Imagine my lack of surprise when no automated credits showed up, so I had to call each month until they finally broke down and gave me a manual credit. Fuck you, build a better system.

So here I sit now with AT&T and not once have I had to call and complain about my bill. They were even able to put a purchasing block on my daughter's phone the day we activated. Sprint had no way of keeping her from "accidentally" buying ringtones and other phone shit that she's not allowed to have (Fuck you, build a better system...except that this one would deny you short-term income at the long term expense of losing customers). Oh, and three months into my contract AT&T happily unlocked my phone so I can use my Orange SIM when I'm visiting the UK...

What rights exactly do consumers have?

It's pretty clear that US cooperations have quite a bit of rights, and can take many forms of legal actions to their own benefit. But what about the consumers?

Re:What rights exactly do consumers have?

Here in the U.S., customers can choose whether they want to get screwed by Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Comcast. Isn't unregulated capitalism great?!

Re:What rights exactly do consumers have?

The US has it great. In Canada, you get to choose whether you want to get screwed by Bell, Telus, Virgin Mobile (which runs on the Bell network) or Rogers. Oh, and you want a GSM phone so you can use your phone everywhere in the world? Well, Rogers is the ONLY GSM provider in Canada (at least in Ontario). Bell and Telus are looking to merge too! And guess what, when they need more profits, they don't cut costs, they just raise prices. Canada has one of the lowest mobile phone penetration in the 1st world because of this.

Re:What rights exactly do consumers have?

Actually, unregulated industries tend to have better customer service... phone service and telecom is HIGHLY regulated...

Re:What rights exactly do consumers have?

Having grown up in a era where airlines, power companies, gas companies, the telephone company (there was only one at the time) and the cable companies were all told exactly what they could charge for their services, and what sort of services they could offer, it's impossible for me to avoid laughing when I hear about the claim that such and such a business in the United States is highly regulated. There ain't no more highly regulated entities in these parts, pardner.

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I'm simply responding to the following statement:
"Actually, unregulated industries tend to have better customer service... phone service and telecom is HIGHLY regulated..."

Leaving aside the issue of whether unregulated industries tend to have better custom

Re:What rights exactly do consumers have?

Right, I'll just move out to the pacific islands.

Get real, if you want a job and a place to live you need a phone. The companies you get regular phone service through are the same companies you get cell service from. And internet companies are either the same again or have the same levels of "service."

So all in all, not so much choice.

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Both Corporations and Consumer rights are protected in the US. In this case they would protect you from breach of contract. Most cell phone contracts do provide mechanisms for both parties to terminate prematurely.

Although in the case of cell phones it i

Maybe

They should get the customers bills correct, and then they'd stop calling.

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They should get the customers bills correct, and then they'd stop calling.

You assume they have valid billing issues. Some people dispute stuff just because they don't want to pay it.
And when a customer service rep refuses, guess what they do. Yup, they cal

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if Sprint screwed up that badly why the hell din't these people leave?

$200 "early termination" fees.

What a joke...

I couldn't wait for my contract to end with Sprint. The frequent billing mistakes were nearly monthly in occurance and required WAY to many calls to customer service to TRY and get them fixed.

IN EVERY CASE, whomeever I had managed to get to when I request a 'manager' to speak with, would listen to my story/explanation of the problem and assure me that they had corrected the error and that it would show up on my account with XX number of hours.

Odd, that every time the XX was a different number ranging from 4-48. Also, the fact that none of the errors were ever in fact corrected. When did it become 'standard procedure' to lie to the customer??? Every rep did it, everytime.

I tried writing my disputes and sending them to customer service (with return receipt) to leave a paper trail of the disputed amounts which I never did pay and still owe according to them. None of my correspondance has been acknowledged in any way. They just flat expect that I will eventually pay to avoid the mark on my credit.

I could go on forever, fortunately for you all, I need to go bed. Sprint is a company that deserves whatever it gets. I wish I'd been a customer they dropped. Guess I figured out too soon that they just won't do anything and I don't have the time to talk to those nice people in India all day to have them lie to me.

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I hear you. They actually tried triple billing me at one point. I could go on for hours about them - including pretty much a breakdown at a store because it was plain to the employees in the store, the manager on premises, and the rep on the phone that t

Re:What a joke...

I am from Sprint and I hear you. I have looked into it and have coorected the procedure. This should be active in 28 hours.

They're all evil, you just have to pick one.

I've only ever had one major headache with sprint. Without a long story since I am ready to go to bed, let's just say they screwed my account up so badly I had to call at least 2-4 times a day for 3 weeks to fix it.

At the end of the fiasco, I ended up tal

Charge 'em

Affected customers should bill Sprint the $175 termination fee. Contract's a contract.

Re:Charge 'em

Affected customers should bill Sprint the $175 termination fee. Contract's a contract.

Except the contract is worded in a way that allows Sprint to terminate the service at any time if they choose to, which leaves the customer with absolutely no recourse. As you said, a contract's a contract.

Cost Of Tethered Hardware

Granted, this is AT&T not Sprint but the concept still applies...

Assuming you buy a $600 iPhone that doesn't work on any network other than AT&T's, when they terminate your contract, do they buy back the hardware that they've now rendered unusable?

I wonder if you can claim it as faulty under an extended 2 year Apple care warranty as it now fails to work as advertised? I could see Apple getting pissed at AT&T for forcing them to take returns on otherwise totally functional hardware just because AT&T decided phone support cost too much.

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With phones other than the iPhone, this is probably not much of a valid issue. Most other phones are sold at a greatly reduced price, if not for free, for you signing the contract. When I renewed my Verizon contract last year, I got a LG Chocolate (an ot

Customer Service

I worked at Cingular customer service, in a call center, for over a year during the TDMA nightmare years and 1/3rd the calls were from legitimate billing errors and screw ups due to roaming (that was in the vagueness days where true nationwide roaming cost a fortune), another 1/3rd of the calls were to cancel, or switch plans and the other 1/3rd were from angry customers who were blatantly lied to at the retail store and given free "add ons" that either were pulled off by the auditing department or simply did not work (like trying to add national roaming onto a strictly local plan).

As a customer of Cingular since the switch to GSM I have had ZERO billing errors and I have been all over the country and have never gotten one roaming charge on my Cingular/Att bill.

I can now go into my account on the internet and add and remove features and change my plan, which is just fantastic.

As for Sprint dropping "problem" customers, I am all for that! The whole "firing the customer" is something new that has sprung up in the past ten years and I think in some cases it should be done. The thinking is that you are wasting time helping a customer that consistently has problems with your service as he/she is already badmouthing you to everyone they know and in the end you most likely will leave anyway. Put simply, your resources are better spent helping your normal "bread and butter" customers that spending inordinate time and resources on "a-hole" customers.

Granted, this is not saying that the customers are in the wrong, but it stands to reason if a customer has to call over 25 times in a month for the same reason; Sprint should have escalated those calls after the third call.

Also, some responsibility has to be put on the customers. I certainly would not stand for my bill to be screwed up to the extent where I would have to call 3 times, let alone 25 times; I would have found a way to get out of that contract.

As for Customer Service, it's the same with all of the carriers. You are never going to get consistently good customer service anymore. The call centers in America have a horrendous turnover rate which impacts service greatly.

I have noticed a new trend lately; outsourcing to the Philippines. The last time I had to call a company for tech support the person on the other end had a slight accent, but otherwise was spot on "American," and was familiar with American culture/t.v. show/music/etc. It was a refreshing break from the Indian call centers of late.

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The whole "firing the customer" is something new that has sprung up in the past ten years and I think in some cases it should be done.

Thankfully, this policy also in place in the cable industry. I am allowed to blow off customers who are unreasonable, and it's great to be able to say no and not get into trouble. The customer is not always right. Some companies are far too lenient to cus

Re:Customer Service

For the last 8 years if you ever thought you were actually speaking to an American customer service representative, you were very probably talking to a Filipino. They speak with an American accent right from birth, average income is far lower than in the US, they are loyal, hard working, smart, and they have a generally pleasing disposition even when faced with irate customers. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of call centers here is far higher than in India (per capita anyway)

Re:Customer Service

Granted, this is not saying that the customers are in the wrong, but it stands to reason if a customer has to call over 25 times in a month for the same reason; Sprint should have escalated those calls after the third call.

Except with Sprint, they don't.
You get transfered from one fuckwit to another. Over and over and over again. Agents lie to you repeatedly, giving false contact information, forgetting about promised callbacks the moment the line goes dead, "losing" records of previous calls and promised changes. You call back again, hoping that you'll get them to fix their mistake, but instead get kicked in the balls over and over again by yet another agent hates their job and knows there is no such thing as accountability at Sprint.

As for Customer Service, it's the same with all of the carriers. You are never going to get consistently good customer service anymore. The call centers in America have a horrendous turnover rate which impacts service greatly.

It also helps that all the carriers have nearly identical abusive contracts and policies that ensure that if you want to leave, you're stuck with a several hundred dollar cancellation fee and a (probably) a phone intentionally crippled to only work with a certain company's network.

Once your customers are all so afraid of canceling early due to an ETF and you know the "competition" doesn't really provide anything better than what you have, is there a reason you have to care about what your customer service?
Americans migrate from one carrier to another like mindless sheep, hoping that one cell phone carrier will be better than the last, but once they get their first bill, they realize that their new cell company is just as dishonest, unethical and scummy as the last bunch of fuckers.

I can see their point..

Having worked in customer service for an IT company, I've come across these kinds of customers. They're the ones who never RTFM or refer to online FAQs. They need to speak to an actual person about everything, an email ticket won't do.

They ring up about every little thing and ask obscure questions, like whether the pro-rata charge is based on the day starting at midnight, or 6AM like with the usage meter. Of course you don't know, so you have to waste time tracking down a manager to find out. And they make up an answer on the spot because no-one except for the database admin has ever needed to know that.

Honestly, the amount of employee-hours it takes to deal with these customers isn't worth their monthly service fee. My company would encourage these customers to churn elsewhere too (and waive the contract termination fee). I bet a lot of other companies do this too.

*subscription* required

It's not registation required, it's *subscription* required - $79 annually or monthly payments $9.95.

Man, 59 comments and counting - I'm just so impressed that so many /. readers are paid up subscribers to the WSJ.

What a way to ensure that no-one reads TFA - it's the declaration of a new epoch at /.

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http://online.wsj.com/article_email/article_print/ SB118376389957059668.html [wsj.com]

I'd have to know more about the situation

But I can see this as being legitimate in some cases. Some people are just whiny/needy as hell. They call all the time and take up a disproportionate amount of support time. I can see why a company would decide to cut these people. We have this problem at work all the time, since we are departmental tech support and there's no cutting anyone off.

For example someone will send an e-mail asking for us to do something. This is the preferred method, it goes to the whole support group and is added to the ticket tracking system. Then, 5-10 minutes later (literally) they'll be down in the office asking if we got the e-mail. We tell them yes, these things take time and they proceed to badger us for a specific time when it can be done, which there nearly never is since the issue is generally unknown as to what is wrong. They ten come back a couple hours later, they call, they e-mail again, they e-mail their professor and so on. They seem to think that the way to get quick service is to annoy the service people. In fact it's the opposite, you get better service if you submit a ticket and let us deal with it.

Also the people who tend to do that also tend to be the ones with the least problem solving skills. They'll go to support for the most basic problems, rather than try to work something out themselves. They'll contact us because a printer isn't working, and the problem is it isn't plugged in. They'll contact us because "the Internet is broken" when indeed the network is fine, just a single page they want is offline (and they still want us to fix it) and so on.

Well, if we could, we'd love to terminate support for people like that. The small number of individuals account for a disproportionate amount of support time. In our case, it simply means that everyone, them included, gets worse support since there is just less staff time to go around. However in a company it could very well equal a higher cost. Thus I can see why you'd want to cut them lose.

I'm not saying Sprint is blameless, I'm sure they are not. However if there's a problem, calling every day or multiple times per day just to whine "is it fixed yet?" doesn't help. People need time. Bugging them for an update every day doesn't help anything.

Most of you complaining about incompetent techs

I've been in the communications racket for a loooong time, and yes I've seen my share of call center calls where I would listen to the phone tech, tap him/her on the shoulder and drill into them until they knew what they screwed up.

But, believe it or not (and most of you won't because I'm going to describe YOU in a sec), but the majority of customer issues are caused by the customer.

Case in point:

The very last customer I've ever spoken to (this is why I remember it) had been pushed around by tech support for over a month (at least this is what the customer and the acct showed). So I figured, let me go out of my way for this guy. Forget corporate policy and hit him up with his internet. I asked him to read me the CMAC off of the modem.

"00:15:a3:45:3b:2e", He replied. That mac is just pulled outta thin air for story telling purposes.

"ok, is this 123 I'm a moron lane?" I ask

"yes it is" he replies.

ok I gave you a bootfile for internet, reset your modem and try again" I say

"Nope nothing, you people all have your heads up your asses, get me a manager now!"

"No, sir until I get your internet up I'm not going to transfer you at all"

Over 45 min later, and 200+ insults thrown at my intelligence, I find the problem. This jackass, who for the past 45 minutes has been insulting my intelligence, and has done the same to countless other reps, had told me his CMAC address was 00:15:a3:45:3b:2e when in reality it was 00:15:a3:45:38:2e. Theres one problem right there...we've been giving your internet to someone else. Not only that, but this moron who said he lived at 123 I'm a moron lane, failed to mention at all that it was a duplex and so 123 I'm a moron lane apt A was listed as just 123 I'm a moron lane, while apt b (where he lived) was 123b I'm a moron lane.

I see this type of stuff happen all the time. You can't get online and you have a router? The issues most likely with your router because your modem is online. Customers hear that and right away think...buy a new router. Then they get made when they get home and still can't get online, call back in, and hear the same reason. Then they get ignorant with the support they're getting when they're the moron that buys crap they don't know how to work. They went out and spent 80+ bucks for a router, when, had they known how to work they're equipment, they would just have reset it.

Long story short is: If you don't know how to work your own equipment..........don't blame tech support. Also, don't curl your lips to yell at billing for the $400 cell phone bill you got last month when you have it in the Analog Roaming Mode (do cells even have this anymore? I haven't had a cell in about 8 years)....thats your dumbass fault.

I have always been of the mind that companies like Dell or IBM, or e-machines, or hell linux and microsoft, should ALL have mandatory certification programs if you intend to use thier product. And if you dont have this certificate you CANNOT call in to complain about anything but the color of the sky.

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Long story short is: If you don't know how to work your own equipment..........don't blame tech support.

I did my time in tech support hell, so I feel your pain. Really. I've been there. But I've seen far too many techs who confuse "customer knows nothing" and "customer knows way more than I do but I can't admit it". If I have a serial connection to my

Re:Most of you complaining about incompetent techs

Your attitude is exactly why customer service sucks so much in technology. People in technology have no sense of proportion when it comes to customer expectations. If you can't provide internet service to somebody without having the customer read you an arcane 32 bit number in hexadecimal, perhaps there something you as a company could be doing better. Why have such high standards for the customer's knowledge? YOU'RE the one providing a technical service, perhaps the onus should be on you to do everything technically possible to make it easy. If they knew how to work this shit, you'd be hiring them. If your system is so easy to break that a customer can screw you up by leaving off their fricking apartment number, then perhaps your company should've taken a look at itself instead of blaming customers for being stupid.

I'm guessing the miserable company you worked for never missed billing a customer for a dime, did they? When it comes to billing, you'll cross reference credit report address databases and employ all the cleverness one can wring out of an MBA to figure out exactly how to never miss a receivable. But when it comes to doing your job with a deliverable, you just can't figure out how to do it without the customer reading the bloody hardware ID of the router? That's chicken shit, and the fact that you don't know it and write a rant about "this stupid customer" is very telling. In the old days you would've sent somebody out there fix his problem instead of relying on him to do your field work for you.

Not an entirely unreasonable concept, done poorly

I agree that dropping someone who keeps calling because you can't get their billing right is absurd.

But in a former career, owning a couple auto repair places, I did fire at least a couple customers.

One was clearly either insane or senile. She couldn't get the concept that her Grand Prix was not the same as her (prior car) Cadillac DeVille - it would not automatically release the parking brake when she put it in gear. Just could not get it, and had these long, rambling, largely incoherent phone calls and conversations with us.

The other was back every month with brake squeek on her Diamante, that ultimately turned out to be tire shine going thru the wheels onto the brake parts.

In both cases, I refunded every dime they had ever given us, apologized for our inability to satisfy them, and sent them on their way. THAT is the right way to fire a customer, not this "go away" BS.

What is wrong with calling if it is justified?

...related to billing issues.

Are you suggesting that, if they were being overcharged or billed incorrectly, they shouldn't take the issue up? If they made a reasonable query about their bill and were fobbed-off or ignored I would also be calling until I got satisfaction.

I worked for Sprint

For a while I worked doing customer support for Sprint. There are two really big problems:

1. A lot of customers are just trying to scam the company.
2. The company is super cheap and doesn't want to pay-up when they are wrong.

To compound this delicate si

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It would be, then again if the company you called did nothing about your inquiries what would you do but keep calling about the issue?

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And end up with a locked phone, an ETF and the exact same incorrect bill being sent to collections.
Great plan!

And as much as the above really sucks, it's still a bargain compared to a lawyer and the time spent to even get a court to look at your case due t

Re:

If you've ever had to deal with a phone company, you'd of course realize that even 25 calls a month will be completely ineffectual, from a problems solving standpoint. The process is, however, very effective therapy for hypotension.

Let me tell you a story

1. So at one point I decided to change my password for my email account. Their web-site had a brain-fart and changed my internet login password too, and, here's the fun part: neither the old one nor the new one worked. But, ok, let's say I somehow screwed up myself, that's not the issue. Read on.

So I call tech support. The guy makes me try both passwords, with and without caps lock, etc, none works. Asks for my invoice number. I receive the invoice together with the phone invoice, he assures me that's the number he needs. I read it to him. "Ok, all's right, you'll receive the new password by post in 1-2 days." Ok, I wait for a week, nothing happens.

I try again. I get asked for the invoice number. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Nothing happens. Some 3 days later, I try again. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Repeat.

At some point I get majorly annoyed and start calling daily. "Ah, oops, it wasn't changed, you'll get the new one by post." The circus repeated verbatim for one and a half months. By then I had dug out an old ISDN card and was using a call-by-call paid-by-minute provider just to, you know, be able to read emails on my other account.

Eventually I get _really_ annoyed and escalate it to hell and back. That was a lot of phone calls in a burst. Turns out that when I moved, both the isp department and the telco gave me new invoice numbers. Different ones. The phone bill only contained the telco one. So the retarded ech support monkeys saw that the number doesn't match, and lied to me. For a whole fucking month and a half, none of them could just tell me "oi, it doesn't match, come with some ID at one of our offices". Nah, they fucking lied to me.

2. My brother buys a house and moves, gives the same retarded telco and ISP the new address, is assured he'll have the new connection within a week. Let me also add that we found out at some point that he's flagged as a sort of VIP customer in their database. (No idea why, maybe because both he and his wife are addicted to their mobile phones, and get a bigger phone bill than some small-ish companies.) So, you know, you'd expect some better treatment than Joe Average.

At any rate, nothing happens. He calls again, get told, "oops, true, nothing was started, we'll send someone ASAP." Nothing happens. Calls again, gets told the same story. I advised him to escalate ASAP, but he too is the kind of idiot who believes that everyone is nice and will actually do what they assured him they'll do. Just like I am. So he too gets to call increasingly often for a month and a half, until he gets in a burst asking to escalate.

The problem? Let's say his house number is 42B. (Not the actual number, but the B is the right one.) So some call centre monkey mis-typed it as 42S. You know, finger slipped. Of course, S doesn't exist there, so they did nothing. But from there noone actually told him what the bloody hell is wrong there, and why they don't activate his connection. They lied to him, again and again, for a whole freaking month and a half. "Oh, yes, we'll send someone tomorrow."

Idiots.

So, you know, sometimes you have to call more than 25 times in a month, because the guys at the other end are simply complete lying cretins, or are required to work by some retarded rules that require them to be complete lying cretins. Sometimes if you just call once and give it a rest, the problem doesn't even _start_ to be solved.

So before demonizing someone for calling 25 times in a month, based on that awful experience, I'll at least give them the benefit of the doubt.

Re:What is wrong with calling if it is justified?

It took two calls to resolve it.

And if it didn't get resolved any time soon? Would you have just sucked up the $4000 charges? I mean, anyone who calls Customer Service a lot is just being difficult, right?

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I wonder if you'll get a response from the apologist fucktard you replied to.

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No, I say the proper way to dispute $4,000 in bad charges by anyone extending credit in exchange for finance charges is to take advantage of the Fair Credit billing Act and refuse to pay them, pay only the undisputed amount, and to avoid any possible co

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I had a $4000 pile of 30+ false charges show up on a credit card once- someone fucker somewhere got the number. It took two calls to resolve it.
That is because the credit card company is bound by laws which protect you from fraudulent charges. The cell p

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ANY (residential) customer who makes over 25 calls on average, per month, for more than one month is either a bad customer or chemically imbalanced. Notice, that's about 1 call PER DAY for and likely about THE SAME ISSUE (probably billing).

Yeah, people sho

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Because I had Sprint and had to call in almost every single month - repeatedly - because their billing system would make "mistakes" and their incompetent CSRs would not actually do what they promised they would to fix it.
I started tracking the amount refun

Re:What is wrong with calling if it is justified?

And I wasn't taking the side of the customer or the company. There can be problems on both sides and they can usually be resolved, as you and several others have pointed out, by a reasonable amount of effort and a few phone calls. But if someone had been incorrectly billed for a large sum of money that they could not afford to pay, particularly if it was taken from their account by direct debit (as is not uncommon, at least in Europe), then I would accept them making numerous phone calls to resolve it. They could be seriously overdrawn at the bank and faced with genuine debts that they now could not pay despite having correctly budgeted for them, and all because the telco had made a mistake. One phone call per day letting the company know that they hadn't credited my account with the money that they had erroneously withdrawn does not seem excessive to me. Without all of the facts we cannot make that judgment but we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand as the post that I originally replied to seemed to be suggesting.

Wrong!

Nowhere in the WSJ article does it say that Sprint counts transfers between departments as "calls" !!! I'd rather wish that people would refrain from posting inaccurate statements about articles linked to from /., especially in cases where the article is not publically accessible...