Are you a mobile phone service provider in the UK?
Is your business focused on providing useful, easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products and services to its customers?
Are you able to handle all the arrangements for transferring my account from an existing provider?
Is your pricing competitive, intuitive and fair (not the cheapest, I’m happy to pay a fair price for good service)?
Even better if you can provide me with both UK and French numbers on the same account, with no ridiculous ‘international’ roaming charges… If so please contact me via this blog. My family currently spends approximately £150 per month on mobile phones, so we are a reasonably good potential customer.
Why am I writing this? Well recently I had to transfer my UK mobile phone accounts from a corporate plan to a personal plan. Given that we had been lumbered with T-Mobile at my old firm (when I first joined it was Orange which had much better coverage, but hey I figured the procurement people must have cut a good deal…), not being particularly interested in spending alot (any) time or energy educating myself and going through the bother of changing providers I just decided to stick with T-Mobile. Inertia. I mean a mobile phone providers are all much of a muchness anyways, right? Bad bad decision.
Since then it has just been one continuous pain in the ass, phones cut off 3 times in 3 weeks - due to insufficient credit limits - and byzantine and ridiculous corporate policies that leave their poor (and in the only bright spot, courteous and trying to help) call centre front line staff in completely exposed and untenable positions with the impossibility of keeping the customer satisfied. In the month since I switched, my wife and I must have spent at least 3 or 4 hours in total on hold or speaking to customer service representatives without resolving anything…what an enormous waste of everyone’s time.
So pushed unwillingly by this desperately poor service, I rolled up my sleeves, headed to Google and started digging into how perhaps I could go about moving to some other service provider. 45 minutes later, I wasn’t any closer to being able to do that - at least easily - and I put my search on hold, quietly facing a unpalatable choice of continuing to pay money to a company that I thought was appalling, or spend at least one of my 30-odd thousand days on this planet, figuring out and implementing (probably at some not insignificant cost and inconvenience) a change in providers…what to do?
The serendipity smiled. Stewing in my miserable dilemma over coffee a couple days ago I get an email from my friend JP who, not content with his full time job 
, points me towards his new gig guest blogging at the Telegraph: “On the economics of the customer.”
When customers wanted scarce things, their choices were constrained, their freedoms curtailed. As a result they were patient and tolerant and accepted shoddy goods and services, often bought from monopolies or oligopolies.
Today the things that customers want are in abundance, and businesses have to face new challenges. How to make money out of abundance. More precisely, how to make money because of abundance. This is what Doc Searls referred to as The Because Effect in Making A New World, and what Stewart Brand was building upon many years earlier.
This new customer, looking for things that are in abundance, wants simplicity and convenience. Today’s customer is far less tolerant of failure. Of unmet expectations. Of poor experiences. So what do we do?
As technologists, we have two choices:
One is to provide the customer a better experience, the freedom to select what he wants, a differentiation based on service quality against a backdrop of abundance.
The second is to create artificial scarcities around the things that are abundant, create new inconveniences for the customer, new lock-ins, new irritants. Irritants like Region Coding on DVDs. Lock-ins like we see in digital music.
For the last thirty years, too many of us in IT have focussed on creating these artificial scarcities, often without even knowing it. First we paid to bury the data in vendor stacks, then we paid to try and dig it out. We’ve been doing this for years. And we’re in danger of doing it again.
Time for a change.
Time to focus on ways of delivering service where the customer wants, when the customer wants, how the customer wants. Time to focus on open platforms, open protocols, open software, open ways of doing business.
That’s what the economics of abundance is really about. Making money because of what you do, and not with what you do. Having customers who stay with you because they want to, not because they have to. (my emphasis)
(Given that JP now works for a phone company, well I just had to smile… So JP, is BT up to the challenge? )
Well as far as I can tell, neither T-mobile, nor for that matter any of their major competitors (at least from what I can see from their websites) have embraced this approach to their business and their customers. Anyhow JP’s Telegraph guest post inspired me (and reminded me of others he and Doc Searls amongst others) to test out the intention economy and possibly solve my problem by reverse advertising. This is what I want to buy. Who can sell it to me?
And (under the heading “you-can-take-the-boy-out-of-the-trading-room-but-not -the-trader-out-of-the-boy”) if someone sweeps me off my feet with what I really want, I would seriously consider putting on a spread trade - buying their shares and selling short shares in Deutsche Telecom. (These have recently traded up on the back of the elevation of Rene Obermann - the “Bulldozer” (uh…yeah, whatever man…) - as the new CEO due to his ’success’ at running T-mobile. Oh the irony…) I however am sceptical that any of the continental incumbents will be able to reinvent themselves and emerge from under the weight of statist history and culture to become organizations that put their customers first and embrace an open and intellegent relationship with the marketplace where success is based not on protecting historical monopoly rents but by giving people something they happily and without coercion want to buy. The Economist seems to think that competition and consolidation between these ‘dinosaurs’ will make things better for consumers. I beg to differ, we don’t need even bigger, more complex, more bureaucratic telecom providers. We need more Skypes. Smart, agile, close-to-the-customer companies. Hey if nobody shows up to solve my problem, maybe I’ll start a company to solve it myself when the snow melts next spring. I don’t know much (now) about how to do it, but I know it would be a winning proposition. Interested venture capitalists and communication services entrepreneurs you know where to find me…
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