Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) has taken a huge amount of heat in recent years for having some of the most inefficient customer service in any industry. In fact, there are many who have concluded that Sprint Nextel has had trouble retaining customers because of its customer service levels -- not so much about its prices and product selections.

When CEO Dan Hesse took the reigns over a year ago, he quickly initiated a series of marketing campaigns and redid pricing on much of Sprint Nextel's calling plan lineup. Ever seen those black and white television commercials? Oddly, they seem to be effective. Almost anything in black and white garners attention from the television viewer. Back to customer service -- Hesse also made a few statements stating that customer service would be back on track. It seems to be just that.

Pali Capital, a customer service measurement firm, ranked the third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S. at the top of its list for customer care. Sprint Nextel was able to answer 89% of calls to its customer service line in an average of 30 seconds, according to the measurement survey. By comparison, the largest wireless carrier in the U.S. -- AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T) -- answered its customer service lines within 30 seconds only 43% of the time.

Though this is not exactly a measurement of customer service quality, it seems the long waits to speak to a Sprint Nextel customer service rep are gone. Perhaps there are not too many customers needing help these days? From looking at all the customers Sprint Nextel has lost recently, there may be an inkling of truth there. Still, it's the third-largest wireless company in the U.S. with more than 50 million customers.

If this blog post is correct, then Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) is possibly taking a large step backward in trying to woo new customers to the wireless carrier's service in the U.S. According to many customer reports and forum postings, wireless carrier Sprint Nextel is terminating service contracts with some customers due to excessive calls into the company regarding service or phone issues. On the surface, it appears that high-maintenance customers are being dropped by Sprint since the cost of providing after-sale service is too high. Solution: Sprint terminates service and zeroes out the customer bill.

This is the first time I have heard of a wireless carrier terminating service contracts from their end without penalty for customers who have accounts in good standing, but who require higher levels of service than other customers. That may be a little hard to grasp, as some customers are never pleased no matter what is done for them and complain about every single thing with repeated phone calls to a company's call center, tying up expensive resources in the process. Are some customers not worth having as customers? Sprint thinks so, and to a point, I agree with the company here.

However, sending a form letter announcing that "your service is being terminated" without any warning beforehand is not a good idea for increasing one's public image. In recent quarters, Sprint has lost hundreds of thousands of customers to the competition and has floundered with subscriber numbers as AT&T (NYSE:T) and Verizon Wireless have grown and grown.

Terminating paying subscribers is not the way to increase customer count. However, Sprint could have opened a dialog with these high-maintenance customers and came to some kind of understanding on why all these customer service calls were happening (billing mistakes? phone problems?) before summarily terminating service without any prior notice. That surely will not win Sprint additional customers, and as all things on the Internet, the word that this is happening will spread like wildfire.