Blogmatic

Can I choose none of the above?

In terms of support both companies have equally dismal performance. This is somewhat of a paradox and the reason I say that is when you talk to the customer support people they seem like good people that are genuinely trying to help. The trouble is none of them seem to have any authority to solve the problems that you have. Typically when I call either of these organizations for support I am transferred to four or five different people. The last time I had a billing issue with Rogers I had to escalate the problem to the VP of Customer Advocacy and National Quality to get it resolved. I have a new billing issue with Rogers now and am dreading the thought of having to dial in to that stupid automated attendant and trying to get to the right person. Perhaps that is the point make support so difficult that no one calls you.

From an organizational perspective what does this say about these two companies? In a word; “Dysfunctional”. If you are going to employ and have a support organization give them the ability to resolve the problem. It seems to me that there is absolutely 0% empowerment at these companies and they have a very top down bureaucratic command and control support structure. What they need is something like 1-800-O-Canada which is a single point of contact for all Canadian government services. I have used it and it is awesome, you call in, talk to a real person and they direct you to the appropriate contact. Most bizarre, who ever thought I would be recommending that private enterprise be more like the government? 1-800 would resolve the auto-attendant crap. Next step in the solution is to give the support people some latitude and capability to resolve the problem. So basically that’s it give your customers easy access to someone that can solve their problem.

In terms of business and marketing I think that Rogers is easily way out in front. Rogers does a great job of attacking Bells Landline service and internet with their home phone offering. Bell expressview may have a reasonable showing in rural areas but will, in my opinion, never gain much traction in urban and suburban areas. Where Rogers competes they win. Bell has retired those cute and cuddly beavers Frank and Gordon and is rebranding. “Frankly” I never understood the beaver campaign and am reasonably certain that while Frank and Gordon were very popular they never did anything in terms of selling Bell services. With the recent acquisition at Bell and announcement of 2,500 layoffs things are going to go from bad to worse. Bell is a dinosaur waiting for the meteor to hit and start the ice age.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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There are all kinds of stories circulating in the media about how low the wireless adoption rate is in Canada. The assumption is that this is a bad thing and reflects poorly on our wireless service providers; Bell, Rogers, Telus and the others.

In a few words, ill conceived fluff.

That’s right fluff. Of course there is a lower percentage of wireless penetration in Canada when compared to other countries, particularly those in Europe. This is mainly due to geography. Just checked Statistics Canada and approximately 20% of the Canadian population are rural. When we say rural in Canada this really means rural and rural means no access to wireless cell phone service.

Let’s do a little Blogmatic math. The total addressable market in Canada for wireless cell phone service is 80% (26.4M people) of the population or those that live in urban and suburban areas. According to the media the wireless penetration rate in Canada is anywhere from 62% to 67% (65% * 33M = 21.45M people). Therefore when you factor in geography the actual Canadian wireless market penetration rate is 81.25% which is comparable to other industrialized countries.

Comparing Canada to the EU is not an Apples to Apples comparison more like apples to oranges. However, comparing Canada to Australia may yield some interesting results.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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Something miraculous happened the other day when I was driving in the car and listening to the radio. I heard Gordon, Bell Spokes Beaver, use the “H” word. The “H” word would be home phone. Rogers has been saying home phone for well over a year and done a great job at taking a chunk of Bell’s most profitable cash cow business line. I will take a look at subscriber numbers again soon, but don’t hold your breathe.

Bell is starting to recognize the value of their home phone business and Frankly (no pun intended Mr. spokes beaver) this is good news for them. In fact Bell has a far superior home phone service to Rogers. Bell uses traditional leased line service for their home phone while Rogers uses VoIP service, in my opinion a less reliable and lower quality service. Bell should be beating up Rogers on Home Phone and why they have waited so long to jump on the home phone band wagon is beyond me.

Rogers has been having their way with Bell in the Canadian Clash of the titans and fighting all the battles so far on their turf, and winning too. Bell finally has a service offering that they can make some hay about so let’s see if they can capitalize on their new found home phone.
The battle for home phone supremacy has finally started lets see where it leads.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I conducted a very informal poll and focus group recently of young people regarding Bell, Rogers and Telus wireless plans. Rogers and Telus had strong brand recognition with Telus perhaps edging out Rogers much to my surprise. The Telus fish, monkeys and other animals have done a good job of building brand for Telus particularly with the females.

Perhaps most interesting was that the young people liked Telus best not because of cute and cuddly creatures but because of the MY8 students plan. The young people also like free text and talk and other features. The factors motivating the youth to buy plans are not all about brand they are also about value. The company that has brand and value will do the best and right now Telus is in the lead. Rogers is close behind and Bell is barely on the radar screen. The kid’s sort of thought that Bell had plans but didn’t know too much about them. Bell has a long way to go.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I receive quite a number of hits to my blog with the search term “Rogers MY5” and I thought it might be worthwhile to have a look at the various Fab 5 packages from the top three service providers in Canada (Rogers, Telus and Bell).  So here are the results of my observations of various forms of advertising and a quick web search of the BIG 3. The comparison is largely from the perspective of how the three market their services, although there is a bit of consumer information as well.

All three service providers have major advertising campaigns underway to promote their version of the X-5 plan. Rogers and Telus are aggressively using the television media to get their messages out and Bell does to some extent. Bell is much more prominent on the air waves, at least on the radio stations that I listen to. All three are using print media and the web. The big question is, “who is winning the battle for the minds and wallets of Canadian youth in the wireless market?”Here is a closer look at the three participants.

Telus is aggressively marketing their My Faves offering. The first time I realized the brand name for their “My Faves” was when I read their website. Their TV and print ads, in my opinion, do not do a good job of making the name sticky. While I think the “Telus” brand and image is well done their actual wireless service branding is weak. Their website was the best of the three that I looked at for the wireless plans. The information is really easy to find and laid out in a clean and concise manner. In terms of product offering I think Telus is the leader.They have three easy to distinguish offerings; My Faves 25, My Faves 30 and My Faves 40. Their weakness is in their feeble attempt at social networking. They have some online fishbowl thing where you can add fish to your tank to represent your 5. I think their fishbowl social networking totally misses the mark, but what do I know I still don’t understand the fascination with facebook. Telus has a strong offering but with significant room for improvement.

Rogers is marketing their “Rogers MY5” brand. In terms of brand recognition for their wireless offering Rogers is well ahead of the others. They have a strong, as expected, presence on TV and their other forms of advertising help to reinforce their brand. The brand is hip trendy and in my opinion will resonate with the youth market. Their website and product offering are bad and incoherent. The site makes it really difficult to figure out exactly what you are buying with MY5. The package is part of the Mega Value plans which make it difficult to compare with Bell and Telus. I am not sure if this is inadvertent or not. Rogers has the best social networking offering of the three and are integrated with myspace. Rogers is selling on brand more than product offering and I think doing a good job of it. They are also branding themselves as the “Most Reliable Network”.

Bell seems to be lagging the other two both in terms of branding and product offering. Bell’s product offering is Fab Five 25 and currently only available in BC and Alberta. Their reluctance, for whatever reason, to launch nationally with the Fab Five 25 will probably cost them market share. The actual product offering is almost identical to Telus. The product was difficult to find on their website. No evidence of any sort of social networking to compliment their offering. Bell is a bit of a laggard in the race for the youth market.

The battle for the youth market is being hotly contested between Rogers and Telus, unless Bell starts to move a little faster they could miss out. I think what would really differentiate one vendor from the other would be if they came up with a FaceBook interface.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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A quick pat on the back for Craig, the service technician from Bell Business services. Hydro is digging in our backyard to replace an old transformer. Anyway in the process my home and business phone line were cut. Placing the service call was a bit of a hassle but actually getting the line fixed once the call was made was a no braniner. Craig was very friendly did a great job and had me back up and running in no time. thank you Craig.

If only all of Bell could be like their business services. I recomend Bells business services, very well run division, from the experiences I have had with them.

cheers,

Ian Graham

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The idea for this post came from a Mark McQueen post at the Wellington Fund entitled “BCE Takeover part 10”. After my experience with getting my website up and running last week, the post struck a chord.

There is an incredible amount of focus from the various service providers in Canada on customer acquisition, however, there does not appear to be nearly as much effort put into customer retention. To add some weight to this point I thought I would list a number of the metrics that were published in Bell, Rogers and Telus Q1 management and discussion reports. Metrics are an indication of how companies measure what is important.

Telus: ARPU, Churn, Lifetime Revenue Subscriber, COA Gross, COA Net, MOU
Rogers: ARPU, Churn, COA Gross, COA Net, MOU
Bell: ARPU, Churn, Total Minute Volume, ARPM

Some general comments on the management and discussion reports. Rogers and Telus reports are presented in a similar fashion and it is easy to find the information you are looking for because they have summary tables and a logical flow. Bell embeds all their numbers in large blocks of text  with minimal use of summary tables. The Bell report has fewer metrics than Rogers and Telus and some metrics that neither of the others have such as Total minute volume. This makes it difficult to compare Bells results to the others, … hmmm.

Telus actually has some metrics that I would consider close to customer retention metric with their Lifetime revenue per subscriber.  This seems to provide an indication of customer loyalty. Rogers and Bell do not have a similar metric. Rogers does share many of the other metrics with Telus including COA and MOU. Bell is on a different planet and keeps their churn rates close to their chest, although MOU can be determined if you divide their total minute volume by subscribers .

When you consider what is measured and that the marketing efforts of all these companies are geared toward getting new customers rather than retaining existing customers. It is no wonder the churn numbers are so large. Perhaps offering existing loyal customers better deals would prove more cost effective than always trying to sway those customers that jump at the next best offer.  Just a thought.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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A Bell and Rogers post is long overdue.

The source of information for this post is from my observations of Bell and Rogers ads in the media and the Q1 managment and discussions from Rogers and Bell. Rogers about  12 – 18 months ago launched an attack on Bell landline service with their “Home Phone” Service. I think that this campaign has been well put together and should proably yeild some results for Rogers. Based on Rogers managment and discussion anslysis for Q1 2007 they have increased their number of “Home Phone” Subribers from 498,700 subsribers in the three months ended March 2006 to 773,600 subscribers in the three months ended March 2007. It seems that their marketing efforts are being rewarded with subscribers.

My take is that in response to the Rogers “Home Phone” Assault Bell has launched an attack of their own on Rogers Cable TV with Express vu. A better course of action may have been to protect their landline service, however, there is no indication from Bell of any such plans. Using Expressview to target Rogers Cable service is in my opinion ill advised because Expressview is a weaker offering. Anyway I had a look to see Bells results on the Expressview subscriber front. I reviewed the management and discussions for Bells Q1 Expressvu Service and they experienced a higher level of churn than expected and added only a Net 5.4% new subscribers for Expressvu.

Rogers in my opinion have a solid strategy and are executing with results to show for it. Bell strategy is weak and the results they have achieved are an indication of their ability or inability to execute.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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Google’s dominance of the pay per click market is being challenged. Microsoft adCenter is taking aim at the B2B portion of Internet giants business. This is probably old news to many of you, but it was news to me. What drew my attention to this topic was a direct mail piece from Microsoft ad Centre to my business.

Last week I received in the mail a Microsoft adCenter brochure directed to Klondike soliciting my online advertising business. Pretty cool. Then I noticed that it is in conjunction with Sympatico MSN, strike one. The collateral is nicely done but doesn’t say a whole lot and is certainly not compelling me to go and check out this Google wanna be. The collateral had the look and feel of a logoless Frank and Gordon collateral piece, very likely Bell influenced. Strike two. Finally and probably most importantly the URL they want me to type in is 45 characters long with lots of  “/”  “.”,  Strike three.  Why not advertise Internet pay per click advertising to small businesses on the Internet rather than in print, have the medium match the message. There is so much more to be said on the content, medium and message of the adCentre ad but this will suffice for now.

What I did find both interesting and troubling at the same time was that Microsoft adCenter provides demographic targeting capability. This is good for the company that wants to target specific demographics but bad for the consumer whose demographics are being tracked. You can target age, gender and location, hmmm…. No problem with location but where did they obtain and how are they tracking age and gender. Something very big brotherish about all this gathering and tracking of consumer demographic data.

Anyway back to the original clash of the titans theme. Google and Microsoft has been a match up waiting to happen for some time and it was only a question of where the first battle would take place. It looks like the online AdWars have started. Google is one of my all time favourite companies and Microsoft is right up there too, this is truly a “Clash of the Titans” with two very capable combatants. With Bell as Microsoft’s partner in Canada this would give a big advantage to Google. This is “THE Clash of the Titans” and one I will dedicate a few posts to over the coming weeks and months.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

PS, on the Bell-to-Bell calling front it appears that this is only for B2B and B2C calling not C2C. There was an ad in the newspaper today that clarified the offering, however, I am sure the Bell radio spots are creating confusion in the market place.

PSS, I noticed that recently, yesterday, a number of blogs have leveraged the SCAN of the brochure I had on the web. This was done without my knowledge or consent.
 

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This is the second in a series of reports on Bell, Rogers, Telus and I also added in Shaw Cable for the Internet Access portion of the Wireline report. I never realized that Shaw had such a large share of the Internet Access market in Western Canada.

The Wireline divisions of Bell and Telus covers a whole lot of ground, so I have decided to split it up into a number of smaller bit size pieces as follows:

Wireline
- Internet Access (Today)
- Voice Services (Landline and VoIP)
- Long Distance
- Data (Maybe, Maybe Not)

What this means is the series of reports on Bell and Rogers will extend over about a 9 or 10 week period instead of the 4 or 5 I mentioned in my last post. I have also expanded the scope somewhat and included Telus and Shaw Cable because they are key contributors in the Canadian Internet Access Market.

The Internet Access market is in my opinion at saturation. There will continue to be some growth but likely at a mid single digit rate for the foreseeable future. The majority of new adds for any of the service providers will be a result of population growth and churn from one vendor to another.

The Internet Access market is limited by the three key factors (there are likely others): Digital Divide, the Rural Divide and those that just don’t want Internet access. The source of the digital divide is mainly economic circumstance that prohibits families of limited means from being able to afford high speed Internet. The Rural Divide is caused by the lack of technology to engage many in rural parts of Canada that tend to rely on dial up instead of high speed internet. Finally there are those that just don’t want access to the Internet, I can’t imagine such a thing myself.

All these factors combined total approximately 30% of the households in Canada. According to the 2001 Canadian Census there were approximately 10.8M households in Canada. Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw already serve the vast majority of the 7.6M addressable markets and when you add to that the assorted smaller ISPs and you have a market that is very close to saturation.

More details can be found in the Wireline: Internet Access Report (Coming soon).

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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