With most UK mobile phone contracts now lasting 24 months, couldn’t this have an effect on customer churn? Imagine the scenario; you walk out of the shop with the latest-greatest smart phone and all you had to do was sign a little piece of paper stating that you’ll pay ‘the man’ every month for the next 24 months. Bargain.

You take your new prized possession straight home, open the box, and throw anything that lies between you and the phone over your shoulder (you know like instruction manuals, earphones, screen wipe, case etc.).
For the next couple of weeks you live a joyous life. The vast array of apps that you have installed make your life so much easier you don’t know how you ever survived without them.

Then it happens.

You call your friend to tell them about the new update to the twitbookspace app and they can’t hear you. They call you back and you scream at the phone, desperate to get the news through about the new location-based integration that lets you know EXACTLY where everyone is (to within 500m) you scream into the microphone. Alas, you have failed my friend.

You perk up and try to inform them via SMS but the screen locks up. As you try to pry off the back cover to perform a highly technical ‘battery pull’ you decide that maybe what you really needed all along was your trusty old ‘dumb’ phone. You know, the one that made calls for years and never skipped a beat. The one that was swiftly Mazuma’d as soon as you saw the shiny case of your new smart phone.

Back to the shop.

You explain everything that has happened in great detail, from the moment you held your new baby to the second you returned to the shop. Right up to now when the assistant is still trying to look interested before telling
you that they have a 14-day return or exchange policy, and the update you made to your phones firmware voided that anyway. Damn small print.

The point here is that now the Telco has a customer with 23 months of payments left for a phone that doesn’t work properly. Sure they may pay up for the next 23 months but will they renew? Will they change their contract to the lowest priced tariff and take out a secondary one (with a new handset)? Or will they purchase an identical phone to the one they had before and stick their new SIM card in it?

Bad experience reduces loyalty; and unfortunately subscribers will link poor handset design to the Telco rather than to the manufacturer.
Maybe exchange and refund policies, handset quality assurance processes and customer feedback/returns analysis should be part of RA BAU?