So, we just got wave 2 of the consumer survey back last night. Over 1,500 north American consumers telling us about their comms, devices and attitudes to digital media and transactions.

Those who know me know that I love reading the open ends; and today I wanted to share a question we put at the end of the survey where we invite respondents to write an open letter to their service providers. This wave we got 2,400 letters, even more than the 1,700 last wave. I read them all and here are my thoughts.

The nice thing about these letters are that we deliberately put it at the end, typically 10-15 minutes after we’ve gathered quantitative feedback on service providers. Within that time, we’ve asked about media, TV, Internet and devices and so the respondent should be quite detached from the quant questions that head up the questionnaire.

Obviously, we get more letters to the bigger providers. AT&T got 430 letters, Comcast 268, DirecTV 151, Dish 136, Sprint 128, TWC 129, T-mobile 153, Verizon 377, Rogers 61. We ask about 65 providers in total, but these are the most numerous.

Reading these open ends also gave me a chance to review Tracfone. In my last blog on pet names for phones, I had noticed that few people, except Tracfone customers, name their phone after the service provider. I promised last time to try to understand why this is. In wave 2, there were 59 letters to Tracfone and I subjectively classified each as a positive, negative (abusive or constructive) or neither. Tracfone is 29 positives and 17 negatives; which I suspect will make them the only company to get more positives than negatives, and comments overall tend towards the rant.

What do Tracfone customers say? On the positive “Great service, nice people, reasonable prices, unpretentious”! On the negative its about handset choice, coverage and the ubiquitous whinge about price and technical issues (but no more there than all the rants).

Other companies that got generally attractive comments were AT&T and DirecTV.

So, (and this is based on anecdotes, of course), it seems that if you want customers to think well of you, be an honest partner. How old fashioned it is to think that customers are people, not account numbers! Whether Tracfone does this deliberately or by accident, I don’t know. And I’m not pretending to know whether the marginal EBITDA improvement justifies whatever costs are associated with at least appearing to be an honest partner. I’ll let our analysts do that.

Last wave, and this wave, I’ve been trying to get a sense of what matters to people when you don’t lead them with ideas. Here’s my synopsis of what people care about:

1. Price, especially the big carriers like AT&T and Verizon
2. Technical stuff, like coverage and outage/dropped calls

…no surprise there. Now for the other comments in my perceived order of how often they appear.

3. Off-shore call centers, and particularly not being able to understand the person at the other end of phone
4. Instantaneousness. Not getting a fix in real-time/waiting more than 5 seconds for a username and password
5. Marketing. Especially unsolicited phone calls
6. Lieing and hidden charges. Prices that aren’t really as advertised. (Now, I’m sure the marketing is factually accurate, but ‘perception is reality’. It doesn’t matter if the customer got it wrong, their level of irritation is based on what they thought they heard, not what was said)
7. A feeling of not being rewarded for loyalty
8. Poor billing (inaccurate or incomprehensible)

There is also a common thread of comments for pay TV providers, characterised by “Don’t change the channel line up quite so often”, “Give me the channels that I thought I was going to get”, and “Don’t put porn channels in the listing next to kids channels”. Being able to have more control over which channels appear in the listings might be popular.

I’m getting into this. Statistics are evidential and very powerful, but anedcotes are closer to the heart. My next blog will be to compare the letters from people who say they are “likely to churn” against those that are “unlikely to churn”. I want to compare them to our formal question about churn reasons.

P.S. We’ve just introduced a system that allows non-survey clients to get access to hard data by trading some of their inquiry hours. Survey clients get all the data and analysis as part of their subscription, but if you haven’t joined that club yet, let me know and we’ll get you up and running or talk about trading hours for data.