Signal to Noise

Andy spent way more time on the phone with Blackberry support folks at T-Mobile and RIM than I would’ve ever allowed. By the second hour of runaround, I myself would’ve showed up at the retail store and demanded an immediate resolution to my problem or a cancellation of my contract credited for the value of my wasted time dealing with these morons.  I’m not a fan of Ralphe “one-suit” Nader, but I do share his propensity for coralling consumer anger.
This is a fundamental problem of 1.0 carriers: they think the lock-in approach absolves them of having to provide real customer service, and the fact is: most consumers don’t realize it can be done any better. But not me and old Darth Nader.
So, is there somebody out there DOING it better? Perhaps not yet. Well, I did go to the Apple store yesterday becuse the spontaneously-off-turning Macbook I’d just received back from repair (at Steve’s expense) was now refusing to boot, instead showing me a buttugly LCD full of vertical white lines.  So I took it in. And you know what, ten minutes later I walked out of there with a working machine. End of story. And I was treated like I knew what I was talking about by people (the “geniusses”) who likewise actually knew what they were talking about.  Incidentally, I was so pleased with the service, I purchased new pink nano iPod for my wife as an early birthday present.
Do you think Apple would’ve been selling me that iPod if the service hadn’t been there 100%?  Doubtful.
Obviously, telecom customer service is different. Every time I walk into the Verizon store and ask about one promotion or another, the conversation always ends up with me being asked to sign a two-year contract and applying my equipment rebate to the contract because my crappy LG phone “isn’t old enough” for me to take the rebate on the new Windows Mobile device I want. (I also don’t want to pay $700 for the thing, so, as you probably guessed, the local Verizon store still hasn’t sold me the device I want.)  *Sigh*. Maybe that iPhone won’t be vaporware after all. Not sure if I can hold out until MWSF in January to replace this craptacular LG.
Not to mention the $35 car charger price tag and the slew of know-nothings that seem to staff the entire telecom 1.0 industry’s rank and file.

So what’s the solution?

To me, separating the apps from the access is how you achieve customer satisfaction and value pricing. (Right now what we have isn’t value pricing, because instead of being based on consumer perception of value, like gasoline, it’s based on the amount of money the carriers need to earn back from their heavy 1.0 investments.)  In my mind, the CDMA/GPRS/3G/4G/EVDO cloud should be nothing more than ‘just another access network’, and the application providers involved (RIM, RebTel, Jajah, all these other guys) should be competing with each other. The access is the commodity and the apps are the value prop. So why was my buddy Andy stuck on the phone with a commodity person when he could’ve gotten the value prop person immediately and had his problem solved in 10 minutes?