WASHINGTON-“Roaming is not yet dead, but it is traveling,” said Gary Bowman, network marketing program director for Bell Mobility Canada, on Wednesday, to a conference on international mobile roaming.
In the current environment of one-rate plans and large buckets of minutes, some have said roaming is either dead or dying, Bowman said. “What does roaming mean to your customer? [It means] I should be able to travel … and the service looks and acts the same.”
This customer perception that mobile phones should work wherever, whenever they want, was a constant theme of the USA’s Third Annual Mobile Roaming Conference 1999 organized by IBC USA Conferences Inc. and co-sponsored by RCR and its sister publication, Global Wireless.
For example, the conference chair, Cindy Patterson, director of international for GTE Telecommunications Services Inc., said the lack of calling-party-pays service in the United States is problematic for the global roamer because “when international callers roam in the United States they expect incoming calls to be free, which doesn’t happen in the U.S.”
France Telecom Mobile, which plans to launch inter-standard global roaming soon, is struggling to make it easy for the customer. “Offering a transparent service to the customer/roamer [will be the biggest challenge]. It has to be easy to use. The key is the handset … We will be looking to simplify things from a customer point of view [as much as we can],” said Sara Bussier, FTM international roaming product manager.
Launching inter-standard global roaming also will be a big challenge for Nextel Communications Inc., which plans to offer its Nextel Worldwide service, said Bill Carleton, Nextel international roaming manager.
On the issue of customer care and roaming, Steve Spradlin, president of Ranger Wireless, said it is critical that those negotiating roaming pacts include the customer-service department in those negotiations. Customers will dial *611 for customer service whenever something is amiss, and if they are roaming, they expect customer service to be helpful, Spradlin said.
