Personally, I hold the brown truck responsible for the condition of the satellite industry. Yes, you heard correctly. It’s all about the brown truck. Think about it. The brown truck stops in the street, out climbs a guy (or to be PC, a girl) dressed in a nice brown outfit. In his (or her) hand is a brown electronic clipboard with a pen that doesn’t write anywhere except the screen on the brown clipboard (By the way, what’s up with a pen that has no ink and only writes on a little screen?). Anyway, under their arm is, yep you guessed it, a brown box. Now two days ago, that brown box was on the opposite coast of where it is today. Inside that brown box is a complete home satellite system ordered from an online retailer or telemarketing firm located 23 states away from where that brown box is being delivered.
Now this system wasn’t sold before it was loaded on the brown truck. It was, are you ready for this, given away FREE. Webster’s defines free as: “without cost, without charge.” Is it any wonder the churn rate in the industry is so high? To the customer, there is no value in the system. How could there be? It was given to them free of charge.
Analysts can blame the churn rate on anything they like, but the biggest reason for churn is the fact the customer has no investment in all the equipment in their house. You might be surprised how long you keep that 82 Ford Escort when you spent your hard earned money to buy it. It becomes easy to convince yourself that it runs, rides and drives just like a 2006 BMW, you won’t find any churn here.
As if the free system isn’t enough, guess what, the company is going to send someone out to the customer’s home to install the system for free (there’s that word again). That’s right, no installation charge. The installer is going to hook-up from 1 to 5 receivers without charging the customer for the work. And as sure as the installer tells the customer there will be an extra charge for a pole mount and burying cable in the ground, that customer will be on the phone in a heartbeat, that installer (depending on where the brown box came from) will be told to put in a pole and bury the cable for free. Now the customer is already deciding just how long they will keep the system, since the value is obviously going down by the minute.
Before the installer leaves the customers home, there is the possibility of having to install free phone lines. When the system is activated, the customer is probably going to get some type of free programming and maybe a couple coupons for some free pay-per-view movies. On their way out the door the installer will leave the customer a toll-free number to call if they have a problem or need someone to explain churn to them.
It doesn’t take a well paid analyst to figure out what we already know, churn starts with the arrival of the brown truck. Someone should do a study on the churn numbers of those systems delivered to customers by a local dealer in a service truck. Those customers that had to pay for equipment, installation, pole mount, programming and the PPV movies are probably still watching their system 8 years later.
Someone a long time ago said it best, “If you really do put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.” Then again, maybe this isn’t the reason for churn after all; we were just “Thinking Out Loud.”
Copied and posted from the Transmitter News
The Brown Truck Delivers Churn
Member #: 43928
Registered: 1/26/2006
Posted:
476
Name:
yo
Company:
Me and my tools
Occupation:
Technician
Location:
here and there
Personal:
Experience:
~24 years
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