Forbes spoke with three leading business leaders, including Dan Hesse about success and how they view quality. Published June 2016.
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Reiss: What is a key to your organization’s success?
Dan Hesse: There are two big levers that can lead to success. When I came to Sprint, the company was struggling primarily because service quality had deteriorated, so customers were leaving. Service quality and customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand. We pulled two major levers to turn things around, compensation and agenda. First we linked everyone’s pay to the number of customer calls to care; second, customer service was the first thing on the agenda of every senior team meeting. We were able to reduce our annual care expenditure by 55%, saving over $2 billion in cost per year, while Sprint went from last place in The American Customer Satisfaction Index to first place in our industry, and Sprint was the most improved U.S. company across all 43 industries they study.