Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
I am sure like most of you not a day seems to go by that I am not asked to take a survey or asked for my opinion about a product or service I may have used or was about to use. These are usually in the form of some automated voice asking me to take a survey on the phone, someone stalking innocent bystanders outside a store or innumerable pop-ups on a website.
For the most part, unless I am feeling frisky, I choose not to participate in such endeavors as I usually figure – incorrectly, I may add – that my time is too valuable to waste on giving my infallible opinion – also incorrect – to just anyone. And, for the most part I am going to guess that many of you feel the same way.
(Full disclosure: I did once participate in a Nielsen survey of my radio listening habits. But, in my defense, they did give me $1 and I figured that was about a 183% premium on what my opinion on that topic was worth.)
So, it’s with this pretext that this week’s release of J.D. Power and Associates latest call quality survey got my attention. This is in no way to question the validity of what or how J.D. Power puts together in these reports, but from reading the results and the way in which the company came to those results got me thinking.
According to the J.D. Power, the survey involved more than 26,000 wireless customers from what appeared to be across the country. There was no breakdown of which mobile service those customers were using, but from the results it appears J.D. Power received enough responses from customers across the country using service from the Big 4 as well as users in the “North Central” region using U.S. Cellular.
Fair enough. Having 26,000 wireless customers or about 1% of the country’s total mobile customers seems like enough of a sample to get a good handle on how carriers stack up. Would 2% be better? Maybe. How about 5%? Or 10%? Maybe more still. But, it’s not like you can ask everyone about their mobile service, can you?
Now, I have never been included in a J.D. Power survey so I am not sure how they actually word their questions, but the company does give a hint as to the gist of the questions being asked:
“The semiannual study measures wireless call quality, based on seven problem areas that impact overall carrier performance: dropped calls; static/interference; failed call connection on the first try; voice distortion; echoes; no immediate voicemail notification; and no immediate text message notification. Call quality issues are measured as problems per 100 (PP100) calls, where a lower score reflects fewer problems and higher call quality.”
So, it would appear that the survey in some way asks people to rate their experience with the current mobile provider using these criteria and I can only guess on some sort of graded scale of multiple option answers instead of a “yes or no” response. If I were in charge of these graded responses I would probably go with something like: “never,” “almost never,” “sometimes,” “almost sometimes,” “sometimes sometimes,” “almost always sometimes,” “like maybe sometimes, but other times not,” “always, except when it doesn’t,” and “iPhone user.”
(Maybe J.D. Power uses a list of responses that are more scientific, and really how could they not be, but my guess is that this is probably something more in tune with “real world” responses likely provided by consumers.)
Now, again, I am not questioning the methodology or results of the J.D. Power survey and from the way in which those companies that perform well in such surveys like to shout it from the rooftops I can only assume that those people are also confident in the results. Also, those companies that do not do well typically don’t come out bad mouthing the results, so there is that as well.
But, from looking at the specific topics being covered in the survey, I get the feeling that many respondents would have to be just winging the responses. I mean, how can you really keep track of “voice distortion” or “echoes” during a call on a cell phone? From my experience just about every call includes both distortion and echoes. Heck, that’s half the fun of talking on a cell phone; listening to just how distorted the person you are talking to sounds. I think most applications stores try to sell an app to do that very same trick, and I get it for free on just about every call I make. Suckers!
And dropped calls? I am not sure how those surveyed responded to this, but again I can only guess that for any person that has talked on a cell phone for more than one minute at a time, a dropped call has to be a near daily occurrence. In fact, I use the fact that drop calls are such a common occurrence to just hang up on people I no longer want to speak to and just blame “the stupid phone.” I can’t be the only one, can I?
That’s the fun of mobile service and I can only guess the bane of those trying to somehow quantify how “well” the service works. So, I say good luck to J.D. Power and the like and ask only that they keep on keeping on, because I can only hope that one day I will get the call to participate in a survey on this topic. And unlike just about every other offer, this one I will jump on, $1 or not.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–So, Nokia fired its CEO and decided to bring in someone from Microsoft Corp. to help steer the world’s largest handset giant during its current turn around. (What, being No. 1 was not enough for the former paper-maker? It wants to be No. 1 with a smiley face?)
There is no doubt that Nokia’s fortunes in developed markets has been on the slide and its innumerable attempts to produce a compelling rival to Apple Inc.’s iPhone have been in vain, and at times sort of funny. But, is bringing in someone from a company that has also seen its fortunes slide in the mobile device space the best answer?
When Palm Inc. was looking to return its operations to its former glory it plucked someone from Apple to helm the mast. Sure, Palm might not be the best answer for a company’s turn around, but it did produce a compelling device and an operating system that I still think is the best in the business. And, in being sold to Hewlett-Packard earlier this year for more than $1 billion, Palm did get something of a financial return.
I am not saying that Nokia should have gone out and offered Steve Jobs all the money in the world, which he already has; complete dictatorial control over Nokia, which he already has at Apple; and sainthood in Finland, which is what he has in the U.S.; but that would have been a pretty cool offer and just something the old Nokia might have been crazy enough to do.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at [email protected].
