I was out tonight with two girl friends I know from long ago. We meet up now and again to catch up on gossip to find out who’s pregnant, who’s married and who’s going through their third divorce.
One girl is a Social Worker, the other is a Chief Buyer, both work near London, both are 28 and in various states of what you could call relationships.
One spends around 45 per month on her mobile (and she reckons that’s frugal), the other spends well over £100.
Both were sporting new handsets (recently renewed their contracts). A Nokia and a Sony Ericsson.
NEITHER HANDSET IS SENDING OR RECEIVING MMS OR VIDEO.
How disappointing. Natalie is livid but can’t be bothered to ‘do anything’ about it. She wants to text pictures to Joanne and I — but she has no idea how to resolve the problem. (Note: She doesn’t think to walk back into the Vodafone store, I suspect, because she’s used to a don’t-care service attitude?)
Jo was able to use MMS for three days then her phone stopped sending or receiving them. She doesn’t know what to do fix it.
Combined, they represent around £150 revenue per month to Vodafone with, I suspect, a discretionary spend of around 20% more on the likes of MMS, for example.
I just cannot get my head around this. I have an absolutely massive problem with the industry as a whole not being able to get the simple stuff working. You’ve got the consumers over the hurdle of actually WANTING to send picture messages — you’ve spent hundreds to put the handset in their hand. You’d think that a NEW handset from an operator with the reputation such as Vodafone would work out of the box AND solve any problems over-the-air if there’s a misconfiguration? No. You’d like Vodafone would make a courtesy call or text to say "listen, look, is there anything wrong? Anything we can fix?"
How many ‘normal’ people (normal in the context of non-geeks) are there out there — how many million mobile customers — who would actually quite like to use MMS, but are prohibited because of a problem.
Seriously annoyed, I took each handset and tried sending MMS myself. I looked to see if there was an issue with the settings. Couldn’t see anything. They’re both contract customers and, what’s more, both have an allowance of MMS on their account apparently!
What can you do? Here I am trying to plot out the future of the industry, trying to soak up as much as possible about current and new trends… and then reality slaps you in the face.