On the Call: Sprint CEO Hesse on the brand

NEW YORK

Sprint Nextel Corp. posted its first increase in overall subscriber numbers in three years on Wednesday, and much of that was due to increased retention.

Sprint has invested a lot of effort into keeping its customers happier. On a conference call with analysts, CEO Dan Hesse was asked how much room the company has to keep lowering "churn," or the number of customers who leave every month, and keep growing subscriber numbers.

QUESTION: How should we think about the ability to further improve churn?

ANSWER: Even though we've made these dramatic improvements in terms of customer satisfaction, care, retail, pretty much at every touch point, we still are not the best in class from an absolute point of view at every single touch point. So we still have improvements to make. And as you know, our two major competitors, if you take the big four, we're now three from a churn point of view, two are better. So we have a lot of aggressive internal targets to continue to improve our churn performance.

There's also a lag, if you will, with brand, with respect to the improvements in customer service. So what we're hoping is, over time, as more people know and understand and see third party verification after third party verification after third party verification, these are noncustomers or potentially ex-customers, because that's where we really still have a lot of work to do. If you take a look at the strength of our brand ... Sprint customers, the improvement in what we call MWI scores, purchase consideration scores, are just up dramatically because of course they have experience with Sprint over the last two years. We still need a lot of good work to get that message across to people who have never been our customers or quite frankly may have been past Sprint customers a long time ago.