A company’s come out with a new study saying that moblogs can reduce churn by 70%. Of course, the company behind the survey sells moblogging software, so I’m a little skeptical. I can’t imagine that moblogs would give people a reason to stay with a particular carrier ahead of other things like pricing, coverage or service but there’s one way I can think of that moblogs could engender customer loyalty — lock-in.
Carriers are used to locking customers to their service with measures like long-term contracts with high early-termination fees, and locked handsets. They’re pretty effective, but don’t always apply to prepaid users or because of regulatory restrictions. That’s where these kind of “soft” lock-ins come into play. They foster loyalty not because people necessarily want to stay, but because if they leave, they’ll miss out on something.
The company says the biggest barrier to operators is getting people to use the blogs. Sure it is — because the more a person posts to their moblog, the more they’ve got to lose should it disappear. It’s the same idea for carriers that only let users get photos off their phones by uploading them to a carrier photo-album service. If somebody stands to lose photos they care about because they want to switch carriers, they’ll think twice.
It’s possible to make the argument that this is a competitive differentiation, or something like that. But instead of doing it through lock-in, why not do it by offering the best open service possible? License something like Cognima Snap, or help users get Lifeblog going. Offer them an easy way to post their content to an open system; don’t hold their photos, content and memories ransom.
Hi Carlo,
Operators want to reduce churn numbers, increase customer loyalty and their stickiness, through differentiation and a unique offering. Obviously, operators want services that tie the user to them and make it harder to quit the operator. So, it makes sense that if a subscriber switches to another operator he looses the right to use the “old” operator’s special services – just like loosing the voice mail or other personalized services. This includes storage services, like the ones you described.
However, the stored content is not lost, as the user gets the opportunity to download it to an external source. This may not be the most convenient experience for the user but the content goes with him; Hence it might be a bit extreme to say that the operators keep this data as ransom.
Despite what I wrote above, there might be a place for the regulator to require the operators to enable better interoperability and a more fluent transfer of data between operators. Or, it might not even be the regulator that leads to that, it could just be a market demand that will lead to more openness of services in the future.
For myself, I wouldn’t just leave my memories in the custody of the operator’s caring hands, but market trends prove that these kinds of services are very appealing to a big crowd of customers.