Now, I don't want to veer off course too much on this topic... But I'd really like to throw it out there for people who criticize Sprint's "inability to communicate information to its employees."
To give a context... I work for Hilton Hotels. I don't work IN a hotel, I work for a call center that takes reservations for them, here in So. California. I've worked here for three years. I've worked as a phone agent, I've worked in the Operations department, (real-time staffing, and the dispersal of center-related information) and most recently in the IT department.
I've seen the way information becomes disseminated from quite a few different viewpoints, and I have to say - it doesn't go out very easily. Now, it IS quite simple to send an e-mail out, to direct people about different products, updates, and otherwise. However, when you're working on a large scale and throughout an enterprise of various locations, as well as financial statistics to meet, there's almost no guarantee that people are going to get the message.
So, to put it in a context with my hotels as an example... My call center has ~450 employees who take phone calls. If I send an e-mail out trying to let them know that a phone line is down, and that the agents will not be able to call a specific hotel for whatever amount of time... I will get, at least, four reports from people AFTER I sent the message, stating that they were unable to call that hotel.
The first problem with getting info out are the employees themselves. If your only process for sending out information would be e-mail and press-releases, chances are 80% of the employees aren't going to read or see any of it. They might look for it at the time that the question is presented, but if they delete those "extra" e-mails or don't know how to search effectively, they will fail to receive the information. I mean, a lot of people just don't want to work, they don't truly care, or they've got 1 million other bad things going on in their life where they simply aren't able to focus on call #148.
Second problem is that the ability to MAKE SURE that people get the information is limited. The #1 goal of any call center is to be profitable. Or at least to not lose money. So, if they have a lot of calls, or they have to send a lot of people home because they need to work on a tighter operating budget, they're not going to be paying people to sit around and listen to all the new products that are coming out. In a world like cell phones, where the product life is less than a year, it's really hard to justify spending all that money on making sure each employee has a personal training on what the current products are.
Now, you can mix and match those two to whatever degree you need to for it to make sense, but it's simply quite a chore to get information to people in a reliable manner. I mean, if there really WERE problems with the software for the Curve, and if there ARE supply issues... Then there might not be any message to GIVE to people. A lot of the "inconsistency" we're getting from Sprint could quite possibly be attributed to phone-agents TRYING to find what information they can so they can give you an answer. They may find different details, and they might not find anything. They also don't have the ability to find every release, every post, and track every quote every other agent has cited. They are just regular people, trying to help you out with what information they can find.
They're not the Borg. They're not connected by some collective.
(Whew. That was a million times longer than I meant. But it REALLY bothers me when people get on the CS folks for their information.)
)...is this normal for a non-corp store? Is it possible for corp stores to receive first and then other non-corp locations? Secondly at least this information is still around our predicted dates...
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