Sprint to save money here, but spend more there…
Sprint has announced they will be closing 150 service and repair centers across the nation, and is laying off 330 technical consultants. Additionally, the company will be shuttering 55 of the worst-performing stores, and closing three call centers totaling 1,550 customer service jobs on the chopping block.
The company says this change will be an effort to reduce costs, representing Sprint’s broader plan to shed some dead weight as they promised investors in January of this year.
“Those reductions come as the result of greater efficiencies that we’ve achieved through simpler pricing plans and improved customer service — which have resulted in fewer calls to customer service — as well as adjusting to changing marketplace dynamics,” a Sprint representative said in a statement to Re/code.
All of the moving parts at Sprint
Sprint asserts that they have structured the changes to have the least impact on customers so that phones can still get serviced. Technical consultants will not be in every store, but all should have sister stores within a 45-minute drive.
“We wanted to drive traffic to service and repair centers that were strong, and close ones that didn’t operate as well,” a representative said in a statement to CNET.
They will be cutting operational costs, but they will be dumping money into the continuing improvements to the network, replacing 3G towers with 4G LTE towers, and execs are calling it a “pardon our dust” period, according to CNET.
On another front, Sprint has been eyeballing a merger with T-Mobile, but it is appearing to be less and less likely to take place, with policymakers having already fought hard to keep T-Mobile independent. Perhaps this change in Sprint’s playbook along with profit margins prompted the rollout of the cost-saving plan.
Further, with many other big box stores regrouping, and even closing, Sprint is not the last that will announce layoffs this year.
