Today, I went to a town hall lead by AT&T’s VP of research, Chuck Kalmenak. Chuck’s talk really painted the larger picture of research at AT&T and our priorities as a group. Also, it drove home for me that I’m now in industry and that I’m part of a larger company which makes it possible for me to do all the fun stuff that I do. So, today’s post is about public opinions of wireless communication providers, like AT&T.
I recently came across “What Does The Internet Think” which is a website that searches based on associative sentences to understand the general sentiment towards a particular search. This is obviously not an infallible approach, but I think that it’s a cool way to get a general lay-of-the-land. So, I searched for the 4 biggest wireless communication providers in the U.S.: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. All-together these four providers represent 294.1 million U.S. subscribers. Here are the results, sorted from best to worst:
Why is the Internet so negative about wireless communication providers?
For me, this was good news and bad news. The good news is that I work for the best wireless provider and I’d like to think that I am or will be part of that success. The bad news is that even though the Internet was least negative about AT&T, it was still negative. Why is there no love for any of the mobile providers? What can we do better than what we’re doing right now?
From a consumer point of view, it largely has to do with the perception of terrible customer service, perceived call quality (AT&T was ranked the worst of the four major providers for quality in a survey conducted by Consumer Reports back in December) and pricing.
One of the biggest complaints of the US mobile industry is the cost of SMS. In reality, the cost of the data to send a text message is something like 1/1000th of a penny (actually from a technology standpoint, even less than that) but the consumer is paying on average of 5-10 dollars for text messaging. On some cases, it’s ‘unlimited’, in some it’s a limited amount. The estimated markups from various sources report it to be in the thousands of percents. If you don’t use text messaging at all or perfer to pay as you go, it’s 20 cents per text that you’re being charged.
So there’s that.
Then there’s the pricing plans and limitations on data. Obviously the cost of researching, developing, building and rolling out 4G networks is expensive and someone has to pay for it. It feels like every few months to a year, the companies are releasing new pricing plans or restructing old ones. So it can be hard to keep track of how much you’re paying and what you’re paying. It’s not unheard of for familes to have cellphone bills that go up to 200 dollars, especially if more than one person has a smartphone (which is what most carriers seem to be pushing these days.) The more tech savvy and thusly way more vocal minority also like to shout their displeasure from the top of their lungs about things like ‘not getting OS updates’ and not being able to unlock your phone. There’s even a bill that might get introduced into Congress to make unlocking legal! It would be very exciting for the tech industry if that would happen I think but…
There you have it. Why consumers seem to hate mobile providers.
Thanks for the comment! What do you think about the large number of pay-as-you-go and discount plans like MetroPCS popping up in the US? That’s one of the things that drove prices down in Europe, right?
As usual, transferring the Facebook discussion, which tends to get more fired up:
Lana Yarosh: One of my coworkers thinks that it’s either because of the cost or because of unrealistic expectations of perfect reliability. I thought cost might be the issue, but MetroPCS is much cheaper and has universally negative sentiments… So, I dunno if that’s the only factor…
Bill Leahy: The rent is to damn high…
Hank Carter: Just a thought, I think a lot of people can’t distinguish between a crappy phone and a crappy network. Let’s be honest, cell phones are mass-produced, disposable devices that aren’t intended to last more than 1.5-2 years. Not a full explanation, but it could explain why negativity is present across providers.
Lana Yarosh: That’s an interesting theory, Hank! And that may have some merit — for example, searches for “android” and “iphone” and “nokia” all yield pretty negative sentiments on the site. So, is the best strategy for a provider to build its own phones, optimized for its network?
Patrick Masterson: What if the negative results don’t necessarily have to do with the network itself but rather, say, displeasure with the data plans, costs, customer service, etc. etc. etc.
Joseph Jofish Kaye: Maybe – and this is a wild guess – it’s because all the providers suck and provide massively overpriced and low-quality service in any objective sense compared to nearly any other developed country in the world? Also, I think that website’s methodology is crappy — but if you look at actual ratings of customer service perceptions from JP Powers or similar, the answer does seem to be consistent.
Brian Sherwell: How can you say that consumers have unrealistic expectations of service? Are not those expectations that exact things that the providers convey in all their advertising? Perfect reliability. The fastest network. The best coverage.
Lana Yarosh: Brian, that’s a good point, but does anybody really take ads literally? Technology is never 100% perfect, even in life-critical situations, errors happen.
Patrick Masterson: It’s one thing to take an ad literally when it says “if you drink this beer a party will spontaneously coalesce in your vicinity and ladies will hurl themselves ‘pon you” and another to take it literally when a telecom says “our service is good and worth paying for, and is not crap, like from a butt”
James Fogarty: Let’s not forget how much I enjoy purchasing a device capable of tethering, but having that capability crippled by the network provider unless I agree to pay more to use the data for which I already pay.
Lana Yarosh: It seems that a lot of the frustration is with the packaging instead of with the goods. People want to pay (a reasonable amount) for calls, data, and texts a la cart and then use them as they wish. On my side, I definitely agree with that!
Danesh Ira: I question the methodology used by the website. They use snippets in search results to drive their sentiment analysis to result in what they warn “produces questionable results which should not be taken very seriously”. If it was a good indicator, “Democrats” would likely produce a less negative result than “Republicans” (based on recent elections). Also interestingly it is 100% positive on “whatdoestheinternetthink”, 43% negative on “what does the internet think”, and the “internet’ is about 50% negative.
Danesh Ira: Interestingly one might also ask why is “Christianity” overall positive, but “Christians” overwhelmingly negative. Le sigh. I’m going to stop before I litter this post with positives and negatives. But do try looking up “awesome” and “spectacular”. To end apparently the internet is positive about “dogs” but strongly dislikes a single “dog”.
Lana Yarosh: Oh yeah, as I said, the website is a curious take on the problem, but certainly not scientifically valid. Danesh, actually both the examples make perfect sense to me: awesome vs. spectacular aren’t nouns, so it’s not weird that it failed there; people like the ideal of Christianity but not the way it is enacted by Christians; and, while dogs usually refer to the animal, the word dog is often used as an insult. It works for some things but there are clearly loads of loopholes where the heuristic fails.
Mobile service providers are the public utility of magic (they’re finally using this in their marketing campaigns, too). People love magic! Unfortunately, they don’t like public utilities. AT&T’s corporate ancestry was generally reviled as well (Ma Bell, anyone?), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Instead of fighting this, AT&T should create shell companies that provide innovative consumer solutions 🙂 Let the AT&T name be the sleepy public utility (and B2B solutions provider). WhizBang Co. [tiny-font]A wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T[/tiny-font] can be the cool company that makes video conferencing equipment, or haptic game controllers, or what have you!
Eugene, that’s an interesting point. And actually, I think that AT&T might be quite open to doing that. At least, I’m hoping to see more of that approach in the future.