What Operators Can Do About Bad Perceptions of Service Performance
By Tom Wiencko
There are some things we all love to hate. New Yorkers hate the Boston Red Sox. We all hate the IRS. And seemingly everybody hates their cell phone service. Dropped calls, interference, inability to make calls in well developed cities and on highways all contribute to a perception that mobile phone service quality and reliability is not as good as we'd like. Given that mobile technology is only a little more than 20 years old, its penetration into our society, our lives, and the way the world communicates is nothing short of amazing. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have embraced mobile technology and a significant percentage use it as their only service for voice communications. Despite the worldwide embrace, however, mobile service is widely viewed as poorly performing and unreliable.
Perception is Everything
Consumer Reports reported in its February 2004 issue that complaints about service reliability and billing problems were common for mobile carriers, and that a "significant number of respondents said they had no service or experienced a dropped call or a poor connection at least once in the week before we conducted our survey." JD Power reported in its July 2003 survey that, "Among the problems reported by wireless users, an average of 9 percent of calls experience static or interference and 8 percent experience dropped or disconnected calls." In other words, almost one in 10 calls has some sort of perceived quality problem. Newspaper articles, broadcast reports, even carrier advertising talk about service quality through now notorious questions such as "Can you hear me now?" and, "How many bars do you have?" Just about everybody can name some spot at home, at work, or on a regularly traveled route where mobile phone service is poor or non-existent.
Mobile quality problems fall into three broad categories. The first is the inability to make a phone call from a particular location - commonly known as "no coverage." The second is the inability to keep a call in progress - a "dropped call." The third problem is poor voice quality resulting from static, interference and dropouts.
Consumer Reports reported in its February 2004 issue that complaints about service reliability and billing problems were common for mobile carriers, and that a "significant number of respondents said they had no service or experienced a dropped call or a poor connection at least once in the week before we conducted our survey." JD Power reported in its July 2003 survey that, "Among the problems reported by wireless users, an average of 9 percent of calls experience static or interference and 8 percent experience dropped or disconnected calls." In other words, almost one in 10 calls has some sort of perceived quality problem. Newspaper articles, broadcast reports, even carrier advertising talk about service quality through now notorious questions such as "Can you hear me now?" and, "How many bars do you have?" Just about everybody can name some spot at home, at work, or on a regularly traveled route where mobile phone service is poor or non-existent.