David Pogue on cell carriers
When the iPhone came out, everybody grumbled and moaned about how Apple had chosen AT&T as its exclusive carrier. I grumbled along with them—and then it hit me: Whom wouldn’t people have grumbled about?
People also hate Verizon, and T-Mobile, and Sprint. Everybody feels oppressed by the contracts, mistreated by customer service and victimized by billing gaffes.
I don’t know why one of these cell executives doesn’t just wake up one morning and realize that the way to dominate the cellphone industry isn’t taking out more ads on billboards and newspapers. It’s creating a service that’s so good, the customers love you, recommend you and (here’s the big one) don’t leave you at the first opportunity.
From Waiting for Products to Arrive over at Pogue’s Posts.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the cell carriers. Even the ones who are trying to gain market penetration (Alltell, Virgin Mobile, etc.) are just aping the big telcos’ features. Who here hasn’t seen an ad for Alltell’s “My Circle” ads and thought, “I remember that from back when it was called ‘MCI Friends & Family’.”
This will not happen, ma’am, as all of these companies are run these days by MBA types who favor hard numbers to justify their obscene salaries. The number of people you sign up is a hard number and you can justify the expense of advertising by pointing out that it helps expand the hard number, whereas customer satisfaction, well, how do you quantify that? An unhappy customer pays the same rate as a happy one, so how to tell the difference? Better to stick to the hard number, which looks so much better on the quarterly reports than something as fuzzy as whether or not you’re offering good service.