Sunday, February 27, 2011

Dear vividwireless from a want to be customer

Earlier today I sent this email to vividwireless and I will be interested to see what their response is.  I have posted it hear so that others can think about it and comment if they like.

Dear vividwireless,

First of all let me start by saying that your product offering is very tempting and you appear to offer some excellent services. The only sticking point for me is the credit expiry for your prepaid offering. Let me explain:

I have excellent ADSL2 broadband at home with 150GBs of download per month, my house is also outside of your coverage area so even if the speed of your service was better than my home line I couldn’t change over (if the speed was just as good and I had coverage your unlimited plan would be extremely tempting).

All of that to say that vividwireless would not be my primary connection, however I have to do a bit of travel for work and quite often my travels take me to places that you do have coverage in. When I am staying at hotels it would be very handy for me to have one of your wifi hotspots with me. The trouble is I also sometimes travel in areas where you don’t have coverage and for those places I use a Telstra Next G USB modem. Telstra have coverage in pretty much all of the places you do and a whole lot more to boot. However you have a better connection so when I am in an area you do service I would prefer to use your connection. This brings me to the dilemma. If I buy prepaid credit from you it will most likely expire before I use it all. I understand how that is good for you, but it isn’t good for me.

At the moment I purchase $150 of credit from Telstra which lasts for 365 days. This means I don’t have to worry too much about wasting half of my credit due to it expiring on me before I use it all. If I purchase $150 of credit from you it only lasts 180 days so there is a high chance that I will not have used it all before it expires as I don’t need it the majority of the time. Even if recharging before it expires will extend the time on my credit you are essentially asking me to pay $25 per month for something I don’t use all that often, but would like to use when I need to.

If you removed the expiry from your credit or at the very least made it last for a year no matter how much I recharge with, then I would sign up right now, but as it is I will just stick with Telstra. So instead of you getting some of the money I give to them you will get none of it as I can’t afford the extra $25 a month for something I might not use very much. I imagine that I am not the only one in this situation and that by changing things you could make that a key selling point and appeal to larger market.

I think you guys are doing very well so far and are offering an excellent service (from the feedback I have heard from friends) and are breathing some fresh air into the stuffy telecommunications sector, but I think you can do even better. Think outside the box a little more and ditch the credit expiry and you will remove all reasons for someone not to buy your product.

Cheers,

Caleb Vear

3 comments:

  1. I'm ina similar situation except that in my case vivid's coverage is better than telstra. I found telstra simply won't work on certain places.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Also I think you could share this between different devices. I think this applies for most prepaid and plan options exception unlimited. So let's say you get something that expires in 180 days, but share it across 3 friends... that might be another nice option that could save everyone money distributing the qouta.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It is good that you can share the same account with multiple devices. That is definitely a step in the right direction, but it is still a bit of a problem as it will be hard to figure out who should pay for the credit (eg how to split the bill).

    ReplyDelete