The K Unit

One of the worst kept secrets in the Canadian Mobile industry is that both Telus and Bell are going to be launching their W-CDMA network in 2009. The launch is now imminent with the announcement that both Bell and Telus will soon be launching with iPhones on their networks in the not so distant future. Competition for wireless in Canada is about to get really hot in the next few months and maybe even years.

I won’t claim to be an expert on wireless; I’m more of an observer. My sense tell me that when the dust settles in a few years, price points would remain about the same as they are today. We will get more features due to the evolution of technology but they will eventually stay about here. A large reason for that will have to do with our Canadian geography, the lack of population density and lack of population mass making this business a relatively expensive venture to undertake in comparison to other countries. Companies like Rogers and Bell might be in better shape to provide content delivery by leveraging their media divisions but in general, every other company will have very similar risks, costs and revenue opportunity.

The one factor that every company has control over is the customer experience. Being someone who is very interested in mobile, one of the Twitter searches I follow is “#telus #bell #rogers” and with a medium like Twitter, they can be vocal about how they feel. One thing in common is that people are extremely frustrated and are looking for alternatives from the big 3 today.

Good customer service is the tip of the iceberg for a great customer experience. This starts all the way from the start of a sale all the way through the time a customer chooses to leave a service. I can’t speak for any other service as I’ve been solely a Rogers customer for about 8 years now. Rogers has vastly improved its customer service from when I started using them. It used to be a pain to call them because customer service reps (CSR) could be extremely rude and unhelpful. Today the fear of calling 611 is no longer there and Rogers has gone as far as to hire a Social Media team to help deal with issues on Twitter. It’s still early on but I have high hopes of its success.

Beyond customer service, this is where Rogers falls down and needs to seriously shore up the organization to stem the tide of negative comments. It’s frustrating to call a CSR to know more about plans, features and products of the company that the CSR is representing. It’s also frustrating that there is more knowledge of Rogers on sites like HowardForums.com then in Rogers itself. This problem also extends to the technical side too. One such incident that sticks out in my mind is right after Rogers announced that they too were now able to send and receive Tweets via SMS. The transition was rocky at best. For myself, it took almost 5 days for it to work. One particular person on Twitter had an iPhone and the technical support rep insisted that the problem was with the iPhone and had the individual call Apple multiple times for support. It was pretty clear that if the person was receiving other SMS messages that the iPhone was not the issue. The resolution for the issue ended up being an issue with Twitter not entering all area codes needed to send via SMS. CSRs and Tech Support reps need to be armed with information and knowledge that will make them effective in their job especially when it comes to new high profile features. The truth is that things go awry and customers can accept that. What customers don’t expect is incompetence.

I love Wired Wednesdays. It was the first taste of a start up meetup in Toronto. It’s amazing to see how vibrant the startup culture is in Toronto. This time around was no different. I haven’t been to one since the first one and the event has grown since then. The May Wired Wednesday Toronto featured Spreed, Homestars and Zoocasa. Spreed is a white label news app, Homestars is a review site for trades people and Zoocasa IS THE BEST PLACE TO SEARCH FOR HOMES in Canada.

The reviews of the various start ups is always cool, especially Canadian startups. Even though I wasn’t born here in Canada, I am proudly Canadian. It is what I identify myself with. There were a couple of highlights of that night. The big one for me was Saul’s call to action. The one thing that we don’t do well in Canada is to highlight our Canadian startups. I think naturally Canadians are reserved. We like to remain low key and consistently humble. However, for us to be successful, we have to drum up more support for the various ideas we have here in Canada.

The second highlight of the night was Stuart Macdonald’s point that everyone in your company is the marketing department. It’s similiar idea as everyone in the company is responsible for quality of the product. The point here is that we have to be evangelists for our companies. It’s probably one of the most critical things that we can do.

For my part, I am going to spend some time after each event to play with each product and dedicate at least one blog to review the product. I’ll also be more proactive about talking about some of the internal workings of Zoocasa without revealing company secrets.

Also – directly from the horse’s mouth, check out Saul’s own blog post on his call to action for us.