As I return from my holiday break, I reflect on my 2006 experiences with US carriers. I hit all the major carriers: Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile. I had direct experience with activating accounts for each of them.
My activation experiences included web, corporate store, and third-party store. In Cingular's case, it included both a corporate and third-party store!
My conclusions:
- Web stores give you the best prices, but limited choices. The company plans are too complex to be correctly displayed on the web, so they just don't. If you want one of those limited choices and you know which device you want, the experience is nice.
- Third-party stores are wonderful for comparing carriers, but that's about it. Nobody at the Best Buy store had ever activated a Verizon data plan of any flavor. At the time we went there, the process for activating a Cingular phone was to fill out a piece of paper and have the sales rep call a special Cingular phone number. Not good! If I wanted a phone user experience, I would have stayed home. Third-party employees simply don't have the training or motivation that corporate store employees have.
- Corporate stores gave the best user experience. I tried both Cingular and Sprint (and T-Mobile UK, but that's outside the scope of this entry). The little Cingular store I went to was wonderful! While Sprint has chosen to largely ignore my small 100,000 person city only 40 miles from headquarters, Cingular has at least two stores. The sales personnel were excellent, going to the point of giving me their personal phone numbers to be sure I had everything taken care of. My larger-city Sprint experiences were nowhere near as nice, including long waits in line. The Sprint stores were able to do things no other Sprint outlet (third party, web, phone customer service) were able to do.
Note that carriers have found that accounts created at the corporate stores have higher ARPU (average revenue per user), so one can postulate a correlation between good shopping user experience and awareness of useful features and correct plan selection.
Sprint's third party store experience radically improved in 2006; I wonder whether their sales have improved.
Hint to developers: you can test your applications at Best Buy.