Muddled Tariffs
A new report by OneCompare claims that 39% of UK mobile phone users are unhappy or dissatisfied with the level of customer service they have received. Furthermore, one in four customer service staff fail to answer basic tariff questions.
I am not surprised. Just about every time I have contacted network operators to sort out network connection problems or phone settings, support staff have been clueless. I have even been told some interesting things such as it’s not possible to connect Series 60 phones to the internet. It’s even worse in the USA where one well known operator had to hand me over to five people before someone knew how to provision an internet access point.
Tariffs are another thing. I worked for Vodafone in 1994 when GSM was being introduced. At time we were tasked by the Marketing Department with producing software systems that could support virtually any services with any tariff so that they could mix and match as the market dictated. Such systems were very difficult to conceptualise and design due to the high number of permutations. No-one (in Vodafone Marketing) wondered how end users and support staff would eventually understand this complexity. Today, we have the end result where tariffs are too difficult for user and support staff to understand.
In the longer term, I hope tariffs will become simpler. When converged WiFi hotspot, broadband and landline tariffs become available, I hope to see some rationalisation and simplification. In fact, maybe there’s an opportunity for a network operator (or MVNO) to differentiate themselves by offering a dynamic tariff where you will only pay the lowest price based (retrospectively) on all the current tariffs in the market. This might be implemented by integrating something like OneCompare into the billing system.
