On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Stainforth, Matthew wrote:
ok, next question....how do those of you who DON'T do unlimited compete with AOL and their unlimited package? Do you try to beat them on price, service, or availability (ie they're not in your area yet)?
Service. And in the case of AOL specifically, they're not here yet. But my competitors are doing $17.95 and $19.95 per month so-called unlimited accounts; my 150hour limited account is $25.00/month. Our service is such that customer migration is overwhelmingly one-way...from them to us. Our biggest reason for customer terminations is "moving out of area"...and at that, our churn rate is well under 1%. As soon as I can figure out how to get people to quit getting jobs elsewhere and having to move, I'll be set. (: Even then, I've got a few that moved and kept their email service...I even have one that moved out of the country and still uses us for dialup, simply because we've built that customer's trust in our reliability. I position myself as an ISP for people who are serious about the net: businesses and power-users (and the people who just gotta have the best for the prestige factor). We even tell people that if they're just casual users that they'd probably get a better deal with our competition (which surprisingly causes them to want us more). Simple 'skimming the cream'. While my market share is (I assume) smaller than my competition, a) they pay more, so it is offset, and b) they're just better customers (i.e., they do things like paying on time *grin*). The two biggest things that positions us thus is a) busy signals are rare...that's the one thing that'll piss off somebody *fast* is not being able to log on when they want to, and b) like Jedi's having to build their own lightsaber, everyone who even thinks about answering a phone here has a clue stick of their very own. No "duh, I dunno" impressions delivered to frustrated customers when they're having problems. And if the phone support will take over 20-30 minutes, we roll a truck and do it onsite. Expensive, but in most cases, it buys something that money typically can't buy....loyalty and trust. - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.