Both Marek Pawlowski from the MEX blog and Dean Bubley of Distruptive Wireless have weighed in with posts talking about the sad state of mobile retailing and customer service in the UK. I don’t think it’s all that different from other parts of the world — my experience here in the States hasn’t been much better.

The kicker is that both posts come to the same conclusion: that the sales and service process is highly flawed and inefficient, while churning (switching operators) is often the best — or even only — way consumers can benefit from lower prices.

As Dean says:

So the bottom line is that despite the fact that I’ve had relatively OK service from both companies, I’ve essentially been encouraged by both of them to churn. And despite the fact that I’ve been out-of-contract for about 6 months on both of them - they appear to be trying to crassly upsell me instead of rewarding my loyalty.

And Marek echoes:

The complexity of tariffs, special offers and contractual conditions is creating an environment in which customers can only connect with the true value the operator is prepared to offer by ‘cheating’ the system or doing their own research. This business is crying out for transparency.

The rest of their tales are filled with poor sales practices, poor salespeople, dummy devices (quite possibly the most asinine “sales tool” I can think of) and other gems that most of us have probably experienced. I can understand that the operators and retailers have little incentive to change, since they’ve managed to succeed in spite of themselves thus far, but as handsets grow more advanced and data services become more pervasive and important, the shortcomings of the current sales process will become a much bigger problem. For the most part, customers are left on their own to discover new services and features of their handset (and those activities are hampered by poor usability all around).

What have your experiences been, or what have normob friends and relatives relayed to you? Is there anybody out there doing a great job of selling mobile devices and services? How do you think things could be improved?