In the October Insight section of CRM magazine, I wrote a piece entitled “Sprinting Toward Disaster,” and looked at mobile carrier Sprint’s customer service problems and solutions. Sprint had been in the news a lot the previous month with its court case involving the termination of contracts, commercials by new CEO Dan Hesse, and the news of its plummeting American Customer Satisfaction Index score. Writing under tight deadline for the piece, I wasn’t able to reach a Sprint representative for comment.

However, yesterday I got the opportunity to speak with Jerry Adriano, vice president of customer experience for Sprint, to talk about what the company is doing to address problems of the past and proactively serve its customers.* I was interested to learn about some of the measures Sprint is taking to boost customer satisfaction and to solve customer issues before they start. Here are several of Sprint’s newer initiatives to boost customer satisfaction:

• “Ready Now”: You may have seen the most recent commercial featuring CEO Dan Hesse (talking to the camera while sitting what looks like an old-school diner). The program has been rolled out in stores and now across other channels. “People are buying [from us] advanced devices that are complex,” Adriano says. “We hadn’t been doing as good job in educating customers how to use these capabilities and features and ensuring we have set them up properly in ways they want to use the phone.”
• “Simply Everything Plan”: When cell phone plans have too many complexities, customers get confused. They don’t want to worry about going over minutes, using too many or too few texts messages per month, or whether or not they will be charged for browsing the ‘Net. Many customer complaints come from overage charges and confusion with bills.”Customers like a predictable bill and having all-inclusive bundled plans with data voice, text, etc are important to giving someone a consistent bill,” Adriano says. The aforementioned plan bundles data, voice, and text, so that when the bill comes, the unexpected is avoided.
• “Right Plan Promise”: This effort, which is just now beginning to be used in customer care situations, implements business intelligence to configure the best plan for a customer. Based upon customer data showing a customer’s usage history, previous phones, and billing statements, “plan optimization tools” help a customer decide which plan is best suited for them. “In addition to that,” he says. “We are going to ensure that we walk you though every element and send you a confirmation showing ‘Here’s what you had before, here’s what you got today.”
• “Employees Thanking Customers”: Adriano stresses that the corporation knows customer service goes beyond front-line employees. It should be a priority throughout the enterprise. That being said, he talked about a program that provides employees with discount cards to pass along to random Sprint users they come across. This fosters an obligation to customer care — and makes lucky card recipients happy, too.

Yet, at the heart of my story was the idea that Sprint’s corporate culture had been taking a beating. I quoted a New York Times article in which one Sprint employee equated the Kansas City, Mo.-headquartered workplace to the Shawshank Redemption prison. Adriano, although he said he didn’t have metrics to back it up, says that since Hesse’s takeover in December 2007, the mood has seemingly lifted within the Sprint Corp. “I do believe that from a nonquantifiable perspective, there has been a little more pep in employees’ step — a sense of optimism,” Adriano says. “The employee morale is very much linked to how well the company does. The challenge, as we come out of the period we weren’t doing well in, is that we have to reinforce that, yeah, we aren’t where we want to be, but look at the progress and the improvements we’ve made. We are going to get there. It takes time, but we are on the right path.”

*Please note that I am not endorsing Sprint over other mobile phone carriers. Sprint has an often-talked about CRM tale. This post serves as an effort to hear Sprint’s side of the story.