It Shouldn't be Rocket Science

Everyone likes a freebie or most of the people I know do.  I like discounts; I always get a feeling of satisfaction when I go to a sale and get stuff at ‘half price’; I proudly show off the item and ask “Do you know what the original price was?” and of course my audience (usually someone who likes a bargain too) will ask eagerly “What was it?” and I would reveal the price, with a certain level of pride in my voice, as if I had just revealed the secret to World Peace.

Businesses, retailers and service providers all over the world offer their customers freebies, discounts, incentives, coupons etc as an overt ‘reward’ for their patronage or a covert way of increasing sales and it usually works out well for both parties. However there are certain discounts and promotions that I’d rather not have, in fact just listening to or reading the adverts wears me out mentally! If I pay for a service, I have it at the back of my mind that I’m paying for convenience, so having to do a series of mental contortions to understand an unsolicited reward should not be part of the bargain. That is why I absolutely dislike GSM promos... I just don’t get them. Every time I listen to a GSM promotional advert on radio, I have this niggling worry that I may be a bit slow on the uptake, and for me that is not a good feeling.

If someone is going to give me something, especially something I didn’t ask for, they should keep it simple and free of ambiguity. But not so for all the GSM operators; there is an endless round of unintelligible promotion going on and I’m left wondering if these promos are made deliberately complex in order to put people off taking advantage of them altogether.  Then the service providers can justifiably say to themselves “At least we offered, it’s not our fault if our customers don’t understand our promos, the important thing is we offered”  

A common thread that runs through the promos are offers of exceptionally low call tariffs, just when one starts getting excited, you hear the dreaded ‘on-net calls only', so to enjoy those call rates, I have to scroll through my phone book looking for contacts on the same network! Then we get into the murky waters of disparate tariffs during a single call, the 1^st minute has a separate tariff from the next 5 minutes and then from the next 10 minutes and on and on it goes. To appreciate the value of this incentive, one must be adept at mental arithmetic... or have a pocket calculator handy after each call.

I recently listened to an advert from one of the GSM operators on radio, this promo aims at increasing the  BlackBerry customer base on a particular network. To this end, existing customers are encouraged to ‘introduce’ new users to the network and are in turn rewarded with free extensions on their own data plans and this is where my understanding of that particular promo ends. The rest of the advert is gibberish as far as I am concerned and the list of terms and conditions to qualify for the extension reminded me of the small print one might find on an insurance policy. I just translated the whole advert to mean “If you think we are going to give you an extended Blackberry data plan for nothing, think again!”

In view of the poor service generally provided by all the GSM operators, I wish I could be offered the following simple incentive at full price:

“Dial any number on any network and get through immediately at no extra charge; we will deliver your text messages without undue delay and instant messages will be delivered instantly rather than ten minutes later. We will not charge you for incomplete or aborted calls. If you have to call our service centre, we will put you through to someone who can actually render service and resolve your complaints in the shortest possible time. We will not hide behind computer glitches to overcharge you and our tariff regimes will not require a degree in rocket science for you to understand”

My final word to all the GSM operators in Nigeria, please keep it simple.

PS: To anyone who reads this, I’d like to receive comments about the various GSM promos; tell me what you think so that I can decide if I need to engage in brain training exercises or not.