Hands0n
14th July 2006, 10:15 AM
Blimey! I could have written some of this myself :D
The Customer experience is not exactly easy, nor trivial to the punter who is not a technophile. Expectations are not often met (I'm being very kind here!) where the hype exceeds the reality by a large degree. Does the UK mobile phone industry lightly accept that £54M bill it currently spends by not handling the issues? How much would it cost them to get it right instead? Surely not £54M, otherwise we are all doomed to continued poor experiences in perpetuity.
Give me £1M of that £54M a year and I'd get the problem sorted out. Loss into profit within a year? Not so hard to do. Make the Customer satisfied by giving them something that really does work out of the box - stop beta testing on live punters - make everything in the portfolio work properly or get rid of it - back it up with a decent CS experience and the punters will be banging on your front door.
The frustration of trying to lead a turbo-cool MobileLifestyle has been revealed in all its button-bashing, customer service monkey-abusing lack of glory.
A survey* of 15,000 "faulty" devices by mobile data provider WDSGlobal found 63 per cent of the one in seven new phones which are returned have nothing wrong with them.
Given each return cost operators at least £35 to test, refurbish and repackage, the bill to the UK mobile industry is estimated at £54m, with the global cost weighing in at a profit-denting $4.5bn.
WDSGlobal communications chief Doug Overton said: "The mobile phone has become the poor relation to its consumer electronic cousins - MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile gaming devices all generally provide a more fulfilling out-of-box experience to the consumer."
Marek Pawlowski, mobile user experience analyst at PMN, describes the findings as "not particularly surprising". The expontential surge in take up of mobile devices has not been matched by data services, which have more limped up a linear revenue curve.
Punters expect a negative experience when buying a new phone. Apologists would argue that a modern mobile phone is closer in complexity to a laptop than an iPod, so a less intuitive user experience is inevitable.
However, so much has been staked by operators on making a success of becoming content providers and providing more services than just voice and text messaging. The risk of the value-added side of the network business now being tainted with the IT nightmare brush must be a paramount concern within the industry.
A big part of the problem lies with retailers, many of whom do not furnish staff with the expertise to advise punters properly. A mystery shopper survey found just 20 per cent of assistants were able to provide even a moderately competent description of the benefits a BlackBerry could offer. Orange is trialing a new model for its high street stores in Notting Hill, incentivising staff on how much buyers use data services once they have bought a phone, rather than paying commission on the sale itself.
Email is still the underexploited killer app for mobile data. MMS has never taken off, and six years down the line, looks like it never will. A £50 bet one industry insider made that it was doomed to failure has been called in. Perhaps networks are hoping users will pool their communications when their quadruple-play offerings touch down and so passively simplify the set-up process for mobile email.
Efforts by Vodafone to support mobile email for businesses, like dedicated expert support staff, are countered by a very "hit and miss" experience for consumers, Pawlowski said.
Overton agrees problems lie within networks as well as with GCSE-lite shop staff. There is a lack of communication between product development, which fulfills its brief by constantly churning out new offerings, and customer support.
The complications of dealing with the ensuing chaos of new settings, over-air updates, and dealing with dissatisfied users is divorced from development. Eerily, WDSGlobal's services are sold on the idea of cutting support costs.
Pawlowski says no matter where the problem sits, what matters is the user experience is broken, and the responsibility for that will always ultimately lie with operators. On all fronts there is "a long way to go". ®
*The survey of returned phones was conducted on customers of "one of the top three retailers in the UK". Spookily, Tesco mobile is "powered by WDSGlobal".
Article Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/no_fault_found/
A few other thoughts:
Email is still the underexploited killer app for mobile data.
Oh, how hard is this to do set up and do? One may be able to blame the manufacturers as much as the operators. But simply, high mobile data charges have been the Poison in this soup. The mobile network operators have done little to promote such data usage. Half-baked ideas have come forward, but the familiar and true means of using eMail when mobile have been mired in difficulty and cost. Only in recent times, with data bundling emerging, are the financial penalties to using data for eMail becoming less. Much more needs to be done.
MMS has never taken off, and six years down the line, looks like it never will.
Cost and complexity are the root cause yet again. Marketing MMS has been difficult, how do you exactly sell such a general purpose facility. Photo messages? Yes, well, is all rather quaint really, but not exactly easy to do. Cumbersome, clumsy, fault prone, not even guaranteed delivery, and yet again those stupidly high charges. Why? It really does not cost more to use capacity and features that are under-used or spare anyway. A better service? Really? Says who? Obviously not the Customer who stays away in droves. And still the mobile network operators do not learn that simple little lesson. Make it easier, make it work, make it reliable, don't charge a premium for it, and promote it in all of its different ways (music, audio, image, text). Indeed, why not make it an evolutionary replacement for SMS text and all of its limitations? Surely SMS has had its day already! For as long as MMS is the poor cousin of SMS it will always be in the doldrums - languising around in the distant hope that someone will actually use it now and then.
The Customer experience is not exactly easy, nor trivial to the punter who is not a technophile. Expectations are not often met (I'm being very kind here!) where the hype exceeds the reality by a large degree. Does the UK mobile phone industry lightly accept that £54M bill it currently spends by not handling the issues? How much would it cost them to get it right instead? Surely not £54M, otherwise we are all doomed to continued poor experiences in perpetuity.
Give me £1M of that £54M a year and I'd get the problem sorted out. Loss into profit within a year? Not so hard to do. Make the Customer satisfied by giving them something that really does work out of the box - stop beta testing on live punters - make everything in the portfolio work properly or get rid of it - back it up with a decent CS experience and the punters will be banging on your front door.
The frustration of trying to lead a turbo-cool MobileLifestyle has been revealed in all its button-bashing, customer service monkey-abusing lack of glory.
A survey* of 15,000 "faulty" devices by mobile data provider WDSGlobal found 63 per cent of the one in seven new phones which are returned have nothing wrong with them.
Given each return cost operators at least £35 to test, refurbish and repackage, the bill to the UK mobile industry is estimated at £54m, with the global cost weighing in at a profit-denting $4.5bn.
WDSGlobal communications chief Doug Overton said: "The mobile phone has become the poor relation to its consumer electronic cousins - MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile gaming devices all generally provide a more fulfilling out-of-box experience to the consumer."
Marek Pawlowski, mobile user experience analyst at PMN, describes the findings as "not particularly surprising". The expontential surge in take up of mobile devices has not been matched by data services, which have more limped up a linear revenue curve.
Punters expect a negative experience when buying a new phone. Apologists would argue that a modern mobile phone is closer in complexity to a laptop than an iPod, so a less intuitive user experience is inevitable.
However, so much has been staked by operators on making a success of becoming content providers and providing more services than just voice and text messaging. The risk of the value-added side of the network business now being tainted with the IT nightmare brush must be a paramount concern within the industry.
A big part of the problem lies with retailers, many of whom do not furnish staff with the expertise to advise punters properly. A mystery shopper survey found just 20 per cent of assistants were able to provide even a moderately competent description of the benefits a BlackBerry could offer. Orange is trialing a new model for its high street stores in Notting Hill, incentivising staff on how much buyers use data services once they have bought a phone, rather than paying commission on the sale itself.
Email is still the underexploited killer app for mobile data. MMS has never taken off, and six years down the line, looks like it never will. A £50 bet one industry insider made that it was doomed to failure has been called in. Perhaps networks are hoping users will pool their communications when their quadruple-play offerings touch down and so passively simplify the set-up process for mobile email.
Efforts by Vodafone to support mobile email for businesses, like dedicated expert support staff, are countered by a very "hit and miss" experience for consumers, Pawlowski said.
Overton agrees problems lie within networks as well as with GCSE-lite shop staff. There is a lack of communication between product development, which fulfills its brief by constantly churning out new offerings, and customer support.
The complications of dealing with the ensuing chaos of new settings, over-air updates, and dealing with dissatisfied users is divorced from development. Eerily, WDSGlobal's services are sold on the idea of cutting support costs.
Pawlowski says no matter where the problem sits, what matters is the user experience is broken, and the responsibility for that will always ultimately lie with operators. On all fronts there is "a long way to go". ®
*The survey of returned phones was conducted on customers of "one of the top three retailers in the UK". Spookily, Tesco mobile is "powered by WDSGlobal".
Article Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/no_fault_found/
A few other thoughts:
Email is still the underexploited killer app for mobile data.
Oh, how hard is this to do set up and do? One may be able to blame the manufacturers as much as the operators. But simply, high mobile data charges have been the Poison in this soup. The mobile network operators have done little to promote such data usage. Half-baked ideas have come forward, but the familiar and true means of using eMail when mobile have been mired in difficulty and cost. Only in recent times, with data bundling emerging, are the financial penalties to using data for eMail becoming less. Much more needs to be done.
MMS has never taken off, and six years down the line, looks like it never will.
Cost and complexity are the root cause yet again. Marketing MMS has been difficult, how do you exactly sell such a general purpose facility. Photo messages? Yes, well, is all rather quaint really, but not exactly easy to do. Cumbersome, clumsy, fault prone, not even guaranteed delivery, and yet again those stupidly high charges. Why? It really does not cost more to use capacity and features that are under-used or spare anyway. A better service? Really? Says who? Obviously not the Customer who stays away in droves. And still the mobile network operators do not learn that simple little lesson. Make it easier, make it work, make it reliable, don't charge a premium for it, and promote it in all of its different ways (music, audio, image, text). Indeed, why not make it an evolutionary replacement for SMS text and all of its limitations? Surely SMS has had its day already! For as long as MMS is the poor cousin of SMS it will always be in the doldrums - languising around in the distant hope that someone will actually use it now and then.