A blogger made 56 calls to Verizon customer service and asked every rep the same two questions about overage and roaming charges for data. He got twenty-two different answers.
Some people see this as just another example of poor customer service from major corporations, some just laugh at the CSRs for confusing bits with bytes and $0.02 with 0.02¢. But the reps on these calls seem courteous and conscientious, and most people who hear about the 2¢ story need a minute to think about the math.
We see a different problem: cell phone plans are ridiculously complicated.
Rate plans for voice are bad enough. A typical plan has a bucket of anytime minutes, a separate bucket for nights and weekends, a third for in-network calling, an overage rate, special rates for voicemail minutes and calls that don’t get completed, roaming limits for US networks, and a whole other matrix of rates for international dialing and roaming.
Verizon Wireless has announced that by the end of next year consumers will be able to bring any CDMA device to its network, provided it meets some minimal technical requirements, and to run any application on that device. Since Verizon has maintained tighter control over their network and devices than any other US cell phone company - perhaps any cell phone company in the world - my initial reaction was a mixture of shock and delight.
But there is less to this than meets the eye. Verizon has taken an unprecedented step - for Verizon. With respect to open access, Verizon is still several steps behind every other carrier in the US.
Who benefits from today’s announcement?
Affluent consumers who want high-end phones will have more choices. Discussions about open access usually focus on these people, but there aren’t very many of them.
Sprint needs to run a few extra laps, to catch up with the carrier pack. While Skydeck research shows that overall the majority of consumers (68%) are positive about their carrier’s performance, Sprint is consistently lagging behind Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Here are four supporting examples from our research:
1) General satisfaction: Is my carrier fair and honest? Are bills predictable? Would I recommend them… or switch?
For these questions, Verizon fairs the best, receiving positive feedback from 75% of its customers and negative feedback from only 9%. T-Mobile and AT&T receive negative marks from 12% of their customers, while Sprint’s customers were unsatisfied 19% of the time.
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday and you have an interest in functional programming languages, come join us at the Bay Area Functional Programmers meeting. David Pollak will be giving a talk on Lift at 7:30pm at the Carnegie Institute on the Stanford campus. Last month’s talk on HAppS was excellent — we’ve integrated a couple of ideas from it into our system at Skydeck. Several of us from Skydeck will be there, so we hope you can make it too.
Skydeck isn’t working with Google. We’ve read the same articles and heard the same rumors that you have. So these are just educated guesses. But everybody else is doing it, so why not us?
Posted by: Jason
Posted by: Dan
Posted by: Mike
