Monday, July 12, 2004
Wireless Providers: What’s Your MHz?
If you’ve been following this blog for the past month, you’ll remember my frustration with AT&T Wireless in my post about loyalty versus appreciation.
This weekend, in an irony of decent proportion, my service improved drastically, along with my annoyance with the company. Let me explain.
In Decmember of 2003, I purchased a new “smart phone” from AT&T Wireless, in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to carry around two devices—the device was going to serve as my PDA as well as my cell phone. The Motorola MPx200 is AT&T’s current flip-phone offering in that arena.
I moved to Minneapolis in the spring of 2004, and noticed a considerable drop in service quality. I had dropped calls in dozens of locations: downtown, Uptown, outside the city, in the city, in the car...everywhere. I called customer service to find out if they had any plans to upgrade or better the GSM service in MN, because I figured I’d move back to TDMA, if there were no plans in the near future to improve the state of reception quality.
I was told that I should wait just thirty more days, because the company was making a major announcement, and drastically increasing and improving their GSM network.
So, I waited.
Sure enough, in May 2004, I received a note from AT&T Wireless saying that they had exponentially increased their GSM coverage through partnerships with other carriers, and that in order to use the service, “..you, Mr. Menon, have to do nothing—your plan will automatically use the new enhancements.”
I could swear that I had even more dropped calls after that.
I called customer service again, and spoke to a very polite lady who took a look at my account, and said that everything looked good: I had a good phone, an appropriate plan, and she wasn’t sure why I was having difficulty. She suggested, very nicely, that I try to turn the phone off and on again. I replied, equally politely, that I did that every day.
Dead end.
Until this weekend. I was at the Mall of America looking for new clothes (I dropped four inches off my waist in the past six months—more on the marketing machine behind that later,) when I happened to wander past the AT&T Wireless store. I decided I’d go in, cancel my service, and switch to Verizon, located just a few stores down.
Jeff, the sales rep who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, took a look at my phone, listened to my issue, and smiled broadly. Turns out that the Mpx200 does not work on the 850 MHz network. It only uses the 1900 and 1150 networks, and 90% of the service enhancements use the 850 network. He was so convincing that instead of leaving the company, I bought a new phone to test it out.
Sure enough, he was right. 4 bars all the way home.
What frustrates the dickens out of me is that AT&T Wireless had all the data to upsell me a new phone, increase my satistfaction, and strengthen a relationship. They knew, for instance:
- My phone type—they knew I had a phone which didn’t work with the new service rollout.
- My service call code, which identifies the category of complaint.
- My usage areas, and how that related to their enhancement.
If they had just personalized their communication in the note of May 2004, I’d be a customer with a completely different story right now. They spend $100MM a year on their advertising campaigns. What do you think personalizing a high-response communcation would have cost?
Here’s why I think I don’t get any such communication from AT&T, and that my hold times on their customer service line always tops twenty minutes, and that their advertising is all about new account acquisition: 2-year service contracts.
AT&T Wireless’ typical customer cannot afford the $250 or so it would take to switch providers. In terms of hard ROI, there’s more immediate benefit in acquiring new customers, than there is in keeping old ones. It’s a short-sighted viewpoint that will be the failing of the company.
And that’s a predicition from a frustrated top-end customer, as well as a professional customer relationship marketer.