It’s time for New Year’s resolutions: stop smoking, lose weight, get to the gym more often, and all sort of other well-meaning pledges that fade by February.
As the shutters close on the Christmas selling season and carriers look to the projects, projections and progress to be made in the year ahead, RCR Wireless News asked a group of industry analysts and observers for their thoughts on what New Year’s resolutions carriers should make to succeed.
Cingular Wireless L.L.C. resolves to … close the gap. Cingular is about two years behind Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. in terms of its high-speed wireless data coverage, mobile devices, services and momentum, according to Iain Gillott of iGillott Research.
“The other guys are out in front, and they’ve got a big lead on Cingular,” Gillott said. “Cingular needs to close that gap. They need handsets, they need smart phones, they need laptops with embedded modems.” And, he added, Cingular needs to offer the necessary incentives to draw customers to its services. If the company can do that, Gillott said, “They’re going to make life hard for Sprint and Verizon.”
Verizon Wireless resolves to … keep the quality, expand the footprint. With high ratings in customer satisfaction, growth and low churn numbers, 2005 was a good year for Verizon Wireless, analysts said. Now the carrier has to work to keep its stellar numbers and maybe snap up a few more rural carriers to fill in coverage gaps, said Roger Entner, vice president of wireless telecom for Ovum.
Sprint Nextel resolves to … keep all its balls in the air. Sprint Nextel has more partners now than ever before and is banking heavily on its entertainment partners continuing to crank out hits, Entner pointed out. The company is maintaining two networks, gobbling up a line of affiliates and digesting Nextel. And if-or when-Sprint Nextel plans to shift customers away from Nextel’s iDEN network, the company needs to start getting its integration ducks in a row, Entner said.
T-Mobile USA Inc. resolves to … choose whether to be the cheap voice carrier or a 3G player. As Entner puts it, this will be the year that T-Mobile USA decides whether it wants to be a lower-cost voice provider or to invest heavily in the June 3G spectrum auction so that it can launch its own 3G network.
Alltel Corp. resolves to … decide its future as a pure wireless player. Alltel has “some serious decisions to make, both in terms of financial issues and expansion issues, and really, how do they execute on some real strategic growth,” said Bob Egan, research director of the Tower Group’s Emerging Technologies group. While several recent analyses have predicted that Alltel will continue to buy small rural carriers, the possibility of the company itself being acquired remains open.
Rural carriers resolve to … be as good as the big guys, but play to their own strengths. “There’s no reason [rural carriers] shouldn’t have Blackberries and Treos and be good at being a carrier. There’s no reason that you should have more churn than anybody else,” Gillott said. He also added that while there may be mergers among some rural carriers, most of the sizable rural carriers already have been acquired and others probably don’t look all that attractive to the national carriers.
Entner advised that rural carriers “play the home card,” take advantage of their ability to be nimble and close to customers, and offer local content-like high-school football scores-that big carriers won’t.
“You can’t compete head to head against the big guys, but the big guys don’t always win,” Entner said.
All carriers resolve to … get serious about customer service. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Start treating customers like human beings,” advised Egan. “I think that has to be front and center. … People tend to buy on referrals and issues around coverage, price and style, but they leave an operator because of quality issues; they’re not delivering up to the quality of the phone or the data connection, or their billing or customer care is just dumb.”
All carriers resolve to … get simpler. Nix some of the tens of thousands of pricing plans that are actively floating around, creating what Egan called “a billing nightmare-a quagmire.” Operating expenses also need to be controlled, noted Philip Marshall, vice president of wireless mobile technologies for the Yankee Group.
“For too long, service providers have been focused on buildout and have not paid adequate attention to the operational cost structures of their organizations,” Marshall said.
“There’s this huge tidal wave billowing below the surface that I believe will hit the reef and the shoreline sometime in 2006,” Egan said.
All carriers resolve to … execute, execute, execute. Gillott noted that handsets have already been ordered and plans laid for 2006, often months ago. For carriers, as for most people, Jan. 2 will bring no great, permanent changes in habit unless they’re already on track for a sustained effort.
“Plans and ideas and philosophies are great. It’s execution that makes all the difference,” Gillott concluded.
