Bloomberg takes a look at the 100 biggest mergers and acquisitions during the last boom, and rates the Sprint-Nextel one among the worst. They noted that the merger “led hundreds of thousands of customers to defect to competitors,” but can we really pin the cause of said defection on the merger? Sprint could have done that, perhaps, even without Nextel. What Nextel did bring to the table, though, was Boost Mobile, which has saved the company’s bacon subscriber-wise while it went through its nearly three-year tizzy. ]]>
Posted in Boost Mobile
Boost saving Nextel/Sprint and being their sole brighspot after the 08 crash was an act of desperation and inspiration. At that pointe , Dan Hesse, the head of Sprint was trying to dump iden/Nextel completely and trying to find a buyer in 2008. There were talks with other iden carriers like NII Holdings (Nextel International) but when the October crash hit, all hope of a sale went with it.
Holding a now worthless, unsellable network, somebody over at Sprint decided, “hey, we have tons of network overhead because we’re losing so many subs on iden/Nextel anyway. Why not practically give it away at $50 unlimited everything?”
And Boost iden unlimited was born and launched. In late Jan 2009, the unlimited prepaid wars started and have been raging ever since. That one move by Sprint changed their very focus and has gotten them to actually get their first customer base increase in three years. Sprint went and bought out Virgin Mobile, revamped Boost cdma and started Common Cents as well as given its mvnos some of the best unlimited and paygo rates in the industry.
The other carriers are catching on but Sprint was the one who made the right move with prepaid of the Big Four first.
Like I said, a crazy combo of desperation and inspiration led to this.
Now… if only they had customer service.
Nextel was highly customer-centric and I left every interaction — via phone or in person — impressed, pleased, satisfied.
Just spending three to four minutes trying to navigate through BoostMobile’s seemingly endless loop of mostly unhelpful voicemail prompts in an attempt to get to a live person has me infuriated by the time I finally am able to talk to a real person — if I manage to.
They keep the key sequence for doing so a carefully guarded secret. And apparently change it regularly so you can’t shortcut.
And then…. the live responders often aren’t helpful. They read scripts. If the scripts don’t have the answer to the issue you are dealing with, just hang on, they’ll read you some more.
One more thing: Now that StraightTalk beats the BoostMobile unlimited price by $10 or $15, will the Sprint customer exodus resume? Or will Sprint get competitive and drop the Boost Unlimited plan price to meet the competition?
If I had a choice, I would leave BoostMobile. But it happens to be the only cell service that works in my semi-wilderness location. (Alltel did. But I can’t get them any more since the merger with Verizon.)