Carragee Consulting

Are you willing to pay for it?

Last year I switched from Google Fi Mobile service to Xfinity so I could get an insane 1GB internet deal for $5/month.

When we moved my account had to transfer regions within Comcast/Xfinity and their utterly integrated systems couldn’t transition my account.

I spent quite a while with customer support before I moved only to find out when I broke my phone screen and I was trying to activate an old one that my account hadn’t been transferred.

Collectively I probably spent 12-15 hours troubleshooting service issues and trying to bring my “sweet deal” from the west coast to the Midwest. Including two hours in the store with my 4 year old where we burned through a ton of snacks, played puppies in the sales floor and overstayed the parking limit.

In this time of customer usage data it’s should be relatively simple to identify that my account was margin negative for Xfinity because I was using too many support services.

On one hand, this should reinforce the need for better systems integration to merge the mobile accounts with the Internet and harmonize promotional pricing across geographies.

There shouldn’t be a need to create an entirely new customer acct and a temporary phone number for an existing customer who moves.

On the other hand, this situation may not be very common and it may not be the best use of their IT budget to enable customers to retain discount pricing.

At some point the opportunity cost of my time convinced me that I needed to switch providers.

It was interesting to see that Mint mobile will provide personalized support for account setup for a $15 fee.

To know what the best pricing move is you’d need to know:
– how frequently and in what cases can users onboard without additional support?
– does ease of onboarding predict tenure or other costs associated with particular customer segments?
– how often do customers pay the support fee without using the extra help?

While the fee could deter some folks from signing up, maybe those are customers who would be margin negative anyway?

In the age of AI chatbots and automation companies will need to monetize living customer support agents and allocate their time to the corner cases where automation isn’t yet successful.Activate to view larger image,