On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Jason A. Nunnelley wrote:
What you can count on is Churn. If customers leave you - you can see the difference.
Yep, that's why I target power-users and businesses. They understand the myriad issues of the speed thing and are willing to look deeper than that initial connect into what they're actually getting. My churn rate is less than 0.5%, despite the fact that I'm more expensive ($25/mo for limited-150hour vs competitions <$20 unlimited). Our largest reason for account termination is 'moving out of area'; we only lose about 1 customer every three months to our competition. Conversely, we gain about 5-10 per month from them...always their best customers too...skimmin' the cream, as it were. Lower tech support costs because our customers generally have more, umm, intelligence. [on the other hand, when they're power users and businesses, especially when they're paying higher prices, when they do have a problem you gotta jump on it quick, and you can't bullshit your way through *anything*. The other thing is that you'll *never* have the biggest slice of the market...just the best slice.] BTW, for anyone interested, a good way to get more accurate stats on where your customers are going when they leave you is to provide free email forwarding for customers who terminate. We give any customer who terminates (for any reason) free email forwarding to their new address for a month. Of course, to activate it, they have to give us their new address. (: Doesn't make it 100% perfect, of course, but will cut through the ones who say 'terminating because we don't need internet/our computer is broken' and then give an email address at the competition. (:
-----Original Message----- From: owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com [mailto:owner-usr-tc@lists.xmission.com]On Behalf Of Lon R. Stockton, Jr. Sent: Sunday, October 17, 1999 3:52 PM To: usr-tc@lists.xmission.com Subject: Re: (usr-tc) 3com V90 Problems
On Sun, 17 Oct 1999, Brian wrote:
What I am getting at, is raw data and numbers are the best, rather than the more subjective data of customers opinions about their connections.
No doubt about that; I've seen the stuff you mentioned happening...one can't really read *too* much into customer complaints (or praises) except a feeling of customer satisfaction. But if a customer is unsatisfied for the wrong (or misunderstood) reasons, the question is where you want to stand on it.
For example...I had a 3rd party actively test us vs. our competition WRT dialup connect speeds/xfer rates. The downside is that they found that for most client-side modems, our initial connect speed was lower than the competition. Funny thing was, in many cases, the competition's higher initial speed would get retrained down....while ours either remained the same or retrained up.
The other huge point that was found was that we had faster overall xfer rates, even with our lower connect speeds. This point was pursued further, and it was found that a 33.6k connection thru us gave faster xfer rates than our competitors' 43-46k rates! Rather interesting what a solid connection with no retransmits can do up against a shaky, albeit faster, connection with a bunch of retransmits.
The above results made me feel good, but there's still the question of what to do about it. The only thing the average customer sees is the initial connect speed, and in the majority of cases, it's quite useless to start telling them about retraining, retransmits, and how the real measure is xfer rate anyway. Most just think you're shooting them a load of bull, trying to swamp them with computer-talk to cover yourself.
Me, I give it a shot anyway...if they understand, great, if not, oh well, they're not really my target customer anyway. That may sound like the age-old 'sour grapes' attitude, but know that I'm not in biz to get the biggest part of the market...I'm here to skim the cream and garner the best customers. When you're targeting power-users and businesses, you wind up with people who understand more of the details.
But much harder if your target is the average joe, my guess would be to switch to whatever platform gave you the highest initial connect so that all the ones who guage everything by their initial speed will be happy. Or plunge into the murky deep and switch their connect speed reporting to the DTE rate so they can be amazed at your super 115k connects. (:
But as your message said, it's hard to trust customer appraisals of your speeds. If you want to know the scoop, get a 3rd party who a) knows what they're doing, and b) has no interest in the outcome to run tests and report back.
PS. No probs here with 3com client modem connections that I can tell. But then again, I don't have any Ascends to compare to. This is with the following:
HARC: h/w ver. 1.0.0 s/w ver. 4.0.30 HDSP: h/w ver. 0.49.0 s/w ver. 1.2.5
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