We recently heard a captivating story that has ramifications for the wireless industry, and for that matter, any industry that deals with the nasty problem of customer turnover.
Last month, a friend went on a volunteer trip to lead a building project in a part of Nicaragua damaged by recent hurricanes. This friend is an expert builder and had recruited a half dozen other contractors to join him on this adventure.
When they arrived at their work site the first day, they met a local minister, who was overseeing the project. As the Nicaraguan minister gave the American team a tour of the project site, the contractors who had tagged along with my friend were beside themselves. From their perspective, most of what the minister had been doing was done wrong, or not the way builders do things in the United States.
Just as they were about to approach an interpreter to let the Nicaraguan minister know what needed to be fixed, my friend stopped them; he knew what they were thinking. He pulled them aside and said, “This pastor does not trust us yet. We are here to serve him, not to tell him what to do.”
The contractors were obviously a little perplexed, so my friend continued. “The man who has done all of this work has a sense of ownership of it. We are not here to take away that ownership. Our job today is to listen to him and learn what he believes his needs are-nothing more. He may genuinely need what we’ve got to offer. But if he doesn’t come to see that for himself, we won’t be able to give it to him. If we don’t listen to him first, we’ll never be able to share what we have.”
With that, the contractors agreed to hold their peace for the rest of the day. My friend tells me that by the next day, after simply listening to the needs of the minister, the team had earned his respect and was able to share all sorts of expertise to help him. By the end of the trip, the team had helped that village down the road to recovery.
So what does making a building in a Nicaraguan village have to do with the wireless industry?
Everything.
The problem
Shouting, shouting, shouting. That’s the business we’re in, isn’t it-noise making?
Handsets must be clear, advertisements must be louder and clearer, and rising quarterly subscriber counts must be shouted the loudest.
It seems strange then, that what we have perceived as our main goal-making noise-also may be the thing digging sharply into our profits.
Almost every quarter, everyone in the wireless industry watches in awe as substantial numbers of new wireless subscribers are reported to Wall Street. But we may be in store for a rude awakening as we, in spite of all our shouting, are faced with equally substantial customer turnover-that dreaded problem we call churn.
It is the hurricane destroying our villages.
No one refutes the fact wireless carriers have done an excellent job getting customers. Few industries can lay claim to the type of growth we have had. But the problem carriers face is keeping those customers.
