Is Verizon’s aggressive sales techniques and terrible support due to recent churn increase?

AT&T and Verizon warn investors of higher Q4 churn as Sprint and T-Mobile increase competition

My family has been a customer for a very, very long time, going back to 2002 at least (although your records only indicate 2009). I had my own mobile software porting company and so I was also a business customer porting mobile applications for all the Brew devices!

And so I am truly disappointed in my recent experience with Verizon. I am used to receiving excellent service and support both at the VZW stores and from the customer service, but it appears that things have really changed!

The aggressive sales techniques followed by extremely poor service are, as I said, very disappointing.

On 2/23/2105 I was at the North County fair in Rancho Bernardo, where I was getting a new iPhone 5 for my son at the Apple store to replace the phone that he damaged. I particularly wanted to do that because he was grand-fathered into the unlimited data plan for the last couple of years and I didn’t want to loose that!

I walked over to the Verizon kiosk at that mall with the new phone to replace the old phone, and the sales agent basically sold me on a new plan saying that he can give all of us  a new phone (ours were just fine, my husband’s and mine) and lower our monthly bill to below $300/month (which I was asking him about as well). He also told me that the unlimited data plans were going to be discontinued so it would make sense to do this switch. He assured me that based on my son’s previous data use for the last couple of months, we would not go over the plan data, which was critical.

So I asked him a few times about this, and he swore to me that everything would be ok.

I returned the phone I bought from Apple to the store, and went ahead and changed our plan, got new phones, etc.

Few days later, I started getting alerts that we were going to go over our allowed data plan! So on March 7th (within the 14 day window) I called VZW service to complain, explained what happened at the VZW kiosk, and asked to have the situation resolved. The service rep said he would try to put my son back on the unlimited plan, but that may take time, and in the meantime he would put me on some other plan, with more data.

I was also promised that my monthly bill would be right around or below the $300/month.

Last week, on 4/3/15, I checked to see our bill, and it was over $400!!! I called your service center yet again, and was told that there was a mistake, and that I would get a $111.95 credit. Today, still NO credit, so I call back. I end up speaking with a supervisor from your Tempa office (Kimmie – would not give me a last name!) and she told me basically that I’m screwed! The $111.95 credit was denied for some reason (although no one called me to tell me), she basically said my new monthly bill would be about $330 plus taxes (so more than it ever used to be) and that it was my problem for choosing the upgrade at the kiosk and not reading the terms and conditions, and that because I was more than 14 days after my warranty I could do nothing more (even though I pointed out to her that I did call within the 14 days, and was told that another change in my plans would fix the data overage problem!). I was additionally asked right away to return my old phones, so I didn’t even have a way to go back to using my old phones. I was also told that I could not get the unlimited plan back for my son, because I upgraded, even though I explained to her that I had the new phone from the Apple store in hand when your eager sales agnet told me he could do better! I even explained to her that since VZW was trying to resolve this problem since March 7th, it shows that VZW took responsibility for this problem, and to now turn it around and make it like it’s all me, is really bad form, and puts me in a no win situation.

I feel that I’m the one being penalized for doing the initial transaction where the Verizon sales agent sold me on this new plan idea. Additionally, the service people seem incapable of really solving my problem, and every time I called I got another promise which turned out to be unfulfilled!

 

It’s The Design Stupid – Or Why I Think Autonomous Car Driving Adoption Will Depend on Innovative Design

It appears to me that when it comes to the consumer side of this new IoT phenomenon, style, usbility and design of the devices is critical. If the given device is both attractive and intuitive, it will also sell for a premium. Some of the examples that come to mind is the Nest thermostat and of course Google Glass!

I think it all started when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod. That design and usability were so completely new, simple, easy to use that it blew our minds. We now want this from all our devices.

In my opinion, autonomous cars will need to follow that trend to gain acceptance. They will need to have such compelling design, style and usability that will make driving secondary, and we will prefer to be inside the car to do things other than driving. I think that Mercedes might have come up with just that sort of vehicle design which was unveiled at the recent CES:

 

The challenge will be to add to the beauty of the style reliability of the technologies that will enable the vehicle’s autonomy to make us completely comfortable to enjoy the ride!

Daniel Obodovski explains IoT

My good friend Daniel Obodovski wrote a very good book, The Silent Intelligence, that provides an excellent overview of the internet of things phenomenon. He and his partner, Daniel Kellmereit, discuss topics such as connected cities, connected homes, connected healthcare, connected cars, and various other connected things, both industrial and commercial.

There are some key points that Daniel and I have discussed often which are well summarized in this video interview he did last year. The day Google acquired Nest (yes, the smart thermostat company!) for over $3 Billion Dollars, made everyone start pay attention to IoT, even though Daniel and I have been involved in this high tech area for over 5 years now!

 

 

Wireless Technologies, Big Data and Healthcare

Ok, this is a bit outside of the usual IoT area, but high tech and healthcare are becoming such a hot topic, that I wanted to share this presentation made by my friend, Dr. Mattison (here is his bio).  He spoke at an intimate gathering of TiE here in San Diego in September 2014. (Start video at 15 minutes if you want to go directly to the start of the presentation). In his presentation Dr. John covers everything from why you should wear your Fitbit, to genomics and social networking, and the transformation of what future of practicing medicine holds, and how doctors will again be healers with the help of these various technologies. In his first slide he has a list of books that he recommends, so stop the video and go to Amazon!

 

TomTom, Your Multi-Sport GPS Watch is Unfinished!

Although the overall wearables market, according to Reportlinker, as reported recently by MarketWatch, “will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% from around $5 billion forecast for 2013 to $9.2 billion in 2014 and more than $30.2 billion forecast for 2018.” , the sport watches have been around for a long time now. My old Garmin Forerunner 305 finally died after close to 8 years of constant use!  However, because of the heated wearables market, the sports watch products need to really compete in this new era, and need to produce well designed and thought out products in order to either retain old customers or attract new ones. I recently bought the TomTom Multi-Sport with the heart rate monitor (the chest strap kind). I train for triathlons, and while I was waiting for my production ready Bia, which was not quite ready yet (I’ve been a loyal supporter and field tester), I needed a replacement for my old Garmin. TomTom has been a real disappointment, and I really wanted it to do the job! Competition is a good thing! In case of the TomTom, unfortunately, the Cons outweigh the Pros! I would not recommend this to any of my triathlon friends! It’s like the TomTom product management got just so far, and then quit and shipped it with bunch of features just not fully baked! Pros:

1. Good visibility display and intuitive way to go from one sport to the next on the watch. User Interface is well thought out.
2. Easy bike mount. I like how you can take it off the wrist band and easily put on the bike and then back on the wrist. Well designed. The wrist strap is also comfortable.
3. Quick satellite connection, don’t need to wait forever
4. Easily connects and transfers data from watch to MySports TomTom smart phone app!
5. Nice integration with MapMyFitness – automatically transfers my works out from TomTom app.
6. Good battery life! Lasts for a very long time!

Cons:

1. Swimming – no GPS tracking in open water, so as a triathlete, this is really disappointing. I swim in the ocean, and this is a must have. I didn’t even think about checking before purchasing, because if it tracks running and biking, why would it NOT track swimming?
2. Swimming again – it counts pool laps, but badly. It doesn’t track when kicking with kick board, or doing some other drills that don’t necessarily involve a regular stroke. Swimming portion is not well implemented for either open water (which it doesn’t do at all) and lap swimming also.

Software/Website – You would think this was a website designed for Kindergartners! Can’t manually edit the workout data on MySports.tomtom website. Can only edit some of the data that was transferred to the MapMyFitness site. Swim data in particular – on MapMyFitness I just delete the workout and enter it manually because the only data that is useful is the time it took to do the workout. Can’t edit the distance when doing open water swim – would like to be able to at least change whatever the distance it calculates, which is completely wrong. I don’t even know how it can calculate the calories burned if it gets the distance wrong by about 100%. Can’t manually change number of laps swam – either on the watch or on the website, so the distance here can’t be adjusted in any way. Total time v. actual work out time – this is very frustrating. The Garmin Connect website reports both the Total Time (the total time of the given workout, including stops, etc), and then subtracts time used for stops and breaks, and gives you these as averages as well, so you get the following as an example for a bike ride: Total Time 55 minutes Actual Time 50 minutes Total Average Speed – 15 Mph Actual Average Speed – 16 Mph Here is a detail page from Garmin Connect that shows the various stats: I wish TomTom calculated these as well. It can’t be that hard to do, just delete the time you’re not moving and then run the calculations the same as Garmin does. MapMyFitness should do it too, and they don’t! Bottom line for a triathlete who is interested in keeping track of the swim workouts either in the pool or in open water, this is useless. Wish I knew that before buying. To TomTom product management – I don’t know how you could not get few swimmers together to give you their opinions and suggestions! And that you didn’t really do a good competitive analysis for the types of reports you should provide on the website. As I stated before, it’s as though you got done part way, and then just gave up and decided to ship before really finishing all the features, and then took repurposed MapMyFitness to have fewer features and look like something drawn with crayons!

IoT: To Be Open or To Be Closed?

I love all my Apple products, I really do! Our Apple TV was so easy to set up, and works seamlessly with my iTunes, and my iPad and iPhone all work in lovely harmony! Not to mention my old and tired, yet still perfectly happy Macbook! Yes, in 2009 I drank the Koolaid, and have not looked back. Occasionally I will try another system, like the Samsung Galaxy mini-tablet, and discard it for it’s poor user experience. But still, I do use Google apps, Google Maps being far superior to Apple’s, and Chrome is a much better browser than Safari or IE! And I’m sure that most of my mobile devices have Qualcomm’s chips in them!

But back to IoT… Apple recently announced their new IoT platform or standard, HomeKit. I suspect that like iTunes, it will be closed for just it’s own ecosystem developers and users. Google in the meantime, with the acquisition of Nest (the smart thermostat and fire alarm gadgets) now has it’s own IoT platform, which they will use for attracting developers to create cool apps for the IoT in Google’s image!

But wait, that’s not all! There are now also various consortiums being started for the IoT. One of them is based on Qualcomm’s own Alljoyn! Qualcomm decided to make it into an open source framework, now part of the Allseen Alliance and is is a project of the Linux Foundation. It has attracted quite a “who’s who” as members, such as LG, Ciscos, and most recently Microsoft. What does all this mean? Well, it means that IoT is becoming mainstream! Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Cisco need to sell more devices, and now that between 2013 and 2017, mobile phone penetration will rise from 61.1% to 69.4% of the global population, they need the consumers to use these devices to manage all the other devices they want us to integrate into our lives. The vision that Ericsson painted in their video not too long ago, “Social Web Of Things” is almost here.

IoT and Security – Commnexus Panel Video!

Thank you Commnexus for uploading the video from last week’s M2M SiG panel discussion on the topic of “Making M2M Secure and Economically Viable”. We had an excellent and interactive discussion with the audience and the panelists. Sunvir Gujral from Qualcomm’s Alljoyn organization did a great job as moderator. I was very fortunate to be able to bring together panelists from companies like Viasat, Verizon Wireless, Intedigital, and my friend Neeraj, the CEO of Tagnos. I wanted to get perspectives from people like Neeraj Bhavani, who is actually deploying hospital M2M solutions, Viasat’s Ian Alison, a “hacker” who knows how to break into M2M systems, Verizon’s David Prill representing the carrier perspective, and Interdigital’s Phillip Brown who is in charge of standards in M2M.

 

 

 

 

Please see the video to get a good feel for the various views, and also to see the very interactive participation with the audience! Again, thank you to Commnexus, Latham and Watkins for hosting, and all the panelists for a great event!

IoT and Legacy Enterprises

“International Data Corporation (IDC) has looked at the components, processes, and supporting IT and connectivity for the Internet of Things and expects IoT technology and services spending to generate global revenues of $4.8 trillion in 2012 and $8.9 trillion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 7.9%.”

These are very impressive growth predictions. One of the big questions for legacy enterprises is how to incorporate an IoT (Internet of Things) into their existing infrastructure to get the benefits of IoT that we all hear about. In a recent article in Computerworld, “The Internet of Things figures into this IT leader’s five-year plan”, ATS IT Director, Chris LeBeau answers several questions on his company’s 5 year plan for implementing an IoT strategy, and trying to figure out all the implementation issues and then how to articulate the benefits. And they have to migrate from mainframes! LeBeau admits that “The data coming off these [networks] would be significant, so how would you process and store that? You need to think about categorizing, correlating, giving it context and meaning so it’s not just data but information you can make decisions from.”

Enterprises that suddenly want to be part of the IoT wave really need to figure out their strategy. They need to understand what areas can best benefit from being part of the IoT system, it can be anything from self-reporting vending machines, to tracking your drivers’ behavior and tracking your assets in real time. It’s drones and self-driving vehicles!

On the back-end side, it’s all about the data, however, and, as Mr. LeBeau points out, how to make sense of it; the data analytics and contextual relationships between data elements!

In order to reach that predicted growth by 2020, there really needs to be a way to enable these large enterprises to more easily migrate from their legacy systems to these new IoT paradigms so that the benefits that we all envision can be made possible. This could be data aggregation and analytics engines, plug and play devices that can be easily deployed on any network, and of course we need to answer the interoperability and security issues.

 

M2M: How To Make It Secure Economically

Security in M2M or as it’s now better known as IoT has now become one of the main potential barriers to widespread adoption. How much security is really needed? What will be the cost of implementing and end-to-end security solution v. the risk of not implementing it?

These and many other security and it’s ROI will be discussed at the upcoming Commnexus M2M Special Interest Group session:

MAKING M2M: SECURE AND ECONOMICALLY VIABLE

I lined up an excellent group of panelists from Viasat, Tagnos, Interdigital, and Verizon Wireless, and I asked the Sunvir Gujral, the Product Manager for Qualcomm’s Alljoyn to moderate. I invite all of you to attend!