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 think we can all admit that Sprint is in a delicate position. The carrier is, for the moment, the nation’s third-largest mobile operator, but many expect that position to change in the coming weeks, if it has not already.
The placing itself is for the most part not a great concern, since whether it’s No. 3 or No. 4 it is still a good-sized mobile operator gathering payments each month from more than 50 million connections on its network. However, the carrier’s regression over the past several years has shown it to be an operator drifting aimlessly in its lane. Not driving erratically enough to warrant being pulled over, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Thus, the announcement this week from Sprint that it will begin delivering new devices to the homes of “qualified” current customers shows just to what lengths Sprint is willing to think outside the retail box in order to keep hold of customers.
The smartly named Direct 2 You service will see a swarm of yellow and black cars canvas the streets, delivering new devices to current customers deemed worthy of such attention. (We will leave to the side for the moment any potential public ridicule that could come along with the neighbors knowing that those customers are indeed Sprint customers.)
The offering is starting off small. Real small. As in it was initially launched in Sprint’s hometown of Kansas City, Kan., before spreading next week to Chicago and Miami. However, Sprint has big plans for the service, touting 5,000 vehicles dedicated to the cause across “major metropolitan” markets by year-end.
(I wonder if they can get some sort of portable cell sites mounted to those vehicles? Might take care of some of those reasons current customers are looking elsewhere.)
Sprint claims the service will allow those deemed worthy to call ahead, make an appointment and magically have a salesperson show up at the house with a new device in hand. No mention of any sort of “time window” on this, so we can assume that the salesperson will show up when scheduled. Also, no mention if you can ask them to pick up some takeout, but again I will assume that’s possible.
The reasoning behind the effort is sound. Everyone knows that it’s much less expensive to hold onto current customers than it is to steal from a rival. This has become especially true in light of the recent marketing craze to pay off early-termination fees and device payments in order to get customers to switch.
So I guess Sprint figures it’s worth a few dollars in gas to send out a salesperson to someone’s home if it means that person will keep sending in monthly payments for a couple more years.
Plus, Sprint has never been able to wave around ultra-low churn results like its bigger rivals. Sure, numbers aren’t everything, but investors sure like to know that their investment is able to save some money on at least one part of their operation even if they are hemorrhaging money out of another.
However, the limited scale of this service continues a hyper-focused approach to operations that limits Sprint’s ability to capitalize on marketing benefits. I guess Sprint could run some advertisements touting the service, but they will have to be local in scope and the results will be accordingly limited.
This seems to follow Sprint’s recent talk about boosting its network performance in a handful of large markets to a “Tokyo-like” quality, which I can only assume means high availability and high data speeds. A noble quest as everyone likes to think life is always better somewhere else, but hasn’t Sprint already tried this before with its initial WiMAX effort? Some markets were said to have access to this new “4G” wonderland, which drove people to purchase WiMAX devices that rarely ever touched a WiMAX signal.
Will this new home-delivery service save Sprint? Probably not. The scale is much too small, and history has shown that most out-of-the-box marketing tactics tend to lose support and fade away. (Though, I am waiting for T-Mobile US CEO John Legere to tweet some expletive-laden insult to Sprint’s latest marketing move.)
But, it does show that the newly installed management is willing to try different things in order to show investors and the media that while Sprint may still be too unsettled to leave on cruise control, it’s at least attempting to keep the vehicle on the road.
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