A Grave Concern: Compelling Your Customers (Cont'd)

Customers do care about dealing with credible companies who will ensure that there is dial tone always available, or who have the people, processes and systems in place to move rapidly to correct service interruptions. Consumers do care about service – they care about seamless number portability should they decide to change carriers for whatever reason, be it price, features, calling plans, funky new phones or annoyance with their current provider.

The transformation of the TDM network to a VoIP enabled, wireline and wireless converged, Wi-Fi-Wi-Max, 3GPP enabled, CAMEL driven infrastructure is of interest only to those of us in the industry. Just like there are communities of interest in neat new things that exist in Finance, Insurance, Travel, Retail, Healthcare, Aerospace, and so on. The vast majority of us do not check which type of plane is flying on which route before deciding which ticket we will purchase. Airline marketing departments have decided (wisely, in my opinion) that the technology is not an important consumer buying factor.

VoIP adoption may indeed be slowing as we move from the early adopters to broader market acceptance, but let’s not blame it on the fact that consumers just don’t understand VoIP. The industry is pushing the wrong messages based on an inward-looking set of assumptions of what is important. There are still many people in the telecommunications industry who claim to understand “VoIP,” but don’t realize that they can have a New York number working in London, England. There are still many industry insiders who think ENUM is important, when it’s already simple and inexpensive to have international number portability, keep your existing number when you move from one side of the country to the other, transparent follow-me calling, and seamless wireless-wireline call transfer.

It’s time to get back to the basics of marketing: telling consumers the benefits of your neat new gadget and letting them decide if your value proposition warrants spending their money. It’s apparently going to be tough going for some of the marketing teams who have been so out of step for the past few years. I’m therefore much in favor of one emerging new term: Broadband Phone. This hybrid term is still a bit too technology heavy, but at least bears some resemblance to something the average consumer does know: Broadband, and Phone. The term conveys important information about the fact that you plug your phone into a different socket – and it builds on the “cool factor” of high speed communications. Maybe this term will form the bridge that will make it possible once again for marketers to focus on customer needs and consumers to focus on meeting their personal value propositions.

Just like any other choice, consumers will act when they perceive that it is the right choice for them – when their personal value proposition is met. Get the service offerings right and consumers will flock to use them, VoIP, 3GPP, or TDM.

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