In its international expansion, US Sprint began planning partnership agreements for several more projects. It spanned across the Atlantic, Pacific Oceans and the Caribbean. The company also looked north in Canada and established interconnections with TelMex. US Sprint also entered partnership with Swedish, Dutch firms and a major customer, Unilever. After the acquisition of US Sprint from GTE, “US” in Sprint was dropped and United Telecom was renamed the Sprint Corporation to better reflect the globalization of the company. By 1993, Sprint was serving over 6 million customers, making it the third-largest long-distance provider in the U.S., behind AT&T and MCI (Sprint Communications Company L.P, 2017). By 1997, Sprints customers had grown to seven million local service customers (Schiesel, 2001). They ran hundreds of televisions ads touting their superior long-distance service and basking competitors, but Sprint was still in fourth place among wireless communications providers, like Verizon, Cingular, and AT&T. …show more content…
In 2014’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, Sprint is awarded the most improved U.S. company in overall customer satisfaction, across all 43 industries, over the last six years. Sprint then initiated a big television advertising campaign that promoted its dependability as being within 1% of other major providers, such as Verizon (Gruley & Moritz, 2016). The commercials featured Paul Marcarelli, an American actor known for the phrase “Can you hear me now?” for Verizon. In the ads, Marcarelli states that he has dropped Verizon and switched to Sprint. Marcarelli then speaks of pricing of approximately 50 percent less than other carriers commenting “Can you hear that?” The ads feature a new slogan “Don’t let a 1% difference cost you twice as much”