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Cell phone plans are too complicated for cell phone companies

November 30, 2007 | 1 Comment

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.

But in the last five years the problem has gotten an order of magnitude more complex, because carriers have applied the same principles to text and picture messaging, internet access, push email, content, and applications.

And the plans change regularly. And new services are introduced all the time. And the carriers don’t keep their web sites up to date and don’t publish all the details of their plans when they do, so we can’t use Google or Yahoo to search for the right answer.

Prepaid plans are supposed to be simple. But have you tried buying a GoPhone from AT&T? Look at the back of the box. They offer you a choice of two tariffs: 25¢ per minute or 15¢ per minute and $1 per day that you use the phone. How are you supposed to work out which one is right for you?

One of us recently spent more than an hour on the phone with T-Mobile customer service, trying to understand the terms of one of their prepaid plans. He got transferred to a supervisor, and then to an ‘expert’ on prepaid plans. They weren’t stupid. The plan was too complicated.

Consumers frequently misunderstand the plans. Salespeople often misunderstand the plans, or misrepresent them (accidentally or deliberately). The people programming the billing systems often make mistakes, and the customer service reps can’t keep track of it all. Surely there comes a point where the cost of dealing with all these errors outweighs the benefits of price discrimination?

The first cell phone company to introduce national flat-rate voice will transform the industry, as AT&T Wireless did when they introduced Digital One Rate in 1998. We can’t wait.

Source: EyelessWriter via the Consumerist.

Posted by: Jason
Categories: ThisIsBroken, Mobile Market, Featured