John Linton We spent the best part of four hours yesterday before 'adjourning' our meeting aimed at improving our mobile broadband offerings. We couldn't answer the question as to why people who sign up for our mobile broadband offerings opt 5:1 for the premium (much more expensive) services over the 'standard' services which are, as far as we can see, the lowest cost on the market. The only possible explanation was that we offer a zero contract on the premium plans and 12 months on the 'standard plans'. Personally, I can't see this being the real issue as mobile broadband is not location dependent which is the big drawback for 'renters' on ADSL plans.
In reviewing how other suppliers 'present' information on mobile broadband it was clear that only Telstra claimed their service was a) fast and b) widely available with no claims made by other carriers and their resellers. What was equally evident, including Telstra, was the desire to 'hide' the true costs of the service as much as is legally possible in the main 'displays' of the pricing of the plans. Our conclusions were that Exetel had the best 'standard' plan pricing and, based on the publicly available information, the shortest (by the proverbial country mile) support and provisioning 'queues' and more skilled support/provisioning personnel at the end of those short queues.
So what is our problem? Not enough people know about our mobile broadband services is the only conclusion we reached before calling an early end to the day's deliberations. We had one idea to promote greater awareness which is something that might work in the not too distant future but needs more thinking through before we attempt to execute it. It basically involves sending a sim with 5 GB of data allowance to 50 telecommunication journalists with our claim that the Exetel version of the Optus mobile broadband service doesn't only deliver faster downloads and greater reliability than the Optus mobile broadband service itself (and better than the Optus resellers such as Virgin, Internode, iinet and, particularly, Dodo) but it runs as fast as Telstra's mobile broadband service in every area but one in which it has been tested.
We obviously need to 'do more marketing' as several readers of this blog suggested when I asked for ideas but Exetel has no money for advertising and we need better ways of communicating with potential customers and real proof of our 'better than Optus' claims - it is of very limited value making such claims ourselves. We will try again today to finish the re-vamp of the mobile broadband parts of the web site and then put in place a much more rigorous, and continuing, marketing program for mobile broadband. Any ideas would be warmly welcomed.
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