Monday, April 23, 2012

What your mobile operator and service provider do not want you to know?

A few days ago CNN published an article on its technology section about what mobile operators and cellular service providers do not want their customers to know. It centers on an application from carrier compare showing a comparison of various service providers/operators. The application is crowd-sourced and cost $1.99, a big amount of money for such an app compared to some really good mobile games costing less than a dollar. The CNN article on comparing networks can be found here.

Being curious and having little knowledge about such applications, I can't seem to understand that the hoopla is all about and why CNN put such worthless coverage on its news feed. Come to think of it similar applications have been available since 2009 and they are far better showing coverage and performance of competing mobile networks; better yet they are free. Well of course carrier compare is free if you don't mind the advertisements.

As a mobile user will you pay 2 of your precious dollars to know how the operator you did not subscribe to performs on a specific area? I am not so sure, but as one of my American colleagues explained to me in America, people will pay for such app. Now that got me thinking why don't we push our Customer Experience Management app in America for subscriber to pay a dollar :-) but then it will contradict on what we believe in that such application should be free of charge to the user and free from advertisements... Maybe one day I will bite the bullet and will do so, but that is not today.

On another point how will operators and service providers react, will they push more of Carrier IQ applications hidden to the user to know that their subscribers are checking out the competition? I believe in 2 things... (1)subscriber has the right to know (2)subscriber has the right to the best service possible. Having said that the network operator or service provider must provide the level of service they guarantee their customers will have, and at the same time keep their subscribers informed. This can be achieved with  CEM applications that are native to a smart phone, has opt-in and opt-out capabilities and has value to the user such as customer self care or information about the services they are receiving.


3 comments:

Sarah said...

the app sucks

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2012/04/12/technology/carriercompare/carrier-app.top.jpg

Mindie said...

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2012/04/12/technology/carriercompare/carrier-app.top.jpg

the app s u c k s

Eduardo said...

why spend that money for it, buy a game instead you will enjoy it more