Big Churn Potential in Wireless Business?

Despite the fact that AT&T and Verizon have low churn rates, while Sprint and T-Mobile have churn higher than they would like, the potential for huge share shifts remains latent, if consumer satisfaction bears any meaningful relationship to actual churn behavior.

Nearly half of readers surveyed by Consumer Reports are unhappy with their cell phone service. Nearly two thirds had at least one major complaint about their cell phone carrier, with about 20 percent naming price as the chief irritant.

But here's the caveat. Most surveys taken over the last couple of decades suggested there was high dissatisfaction with cable TV service, for example. And, to be sure, consumers began to churn away as first satellite and now telco video alternatives are available. Until satellite became a viable option, though, high dissatisfaction was not accompanied by high churn.

The U.S. mobile industry, though, is among the most competitive in the world, so consumers do have lots of choices. So one wonders why more do not act as theory suggests they will, which is that unhappiness will lead them to try another provider. Maybe they are churning, and maybe their continued unhappiness means the new carriers aren't demonstrably and clear better than the carriers they left.

Apparently, neither better coverage nor new smartphones have been enough to change consumer satisfaction all that much, the report suggests, with the salient exception of the Apple iPhone. So will the latent unhappiness translate into higher churn? It's harder to decipher than one might initially think.

If consumers believe all the carriers have some gaps in coverage, have roughly similar or somewhat distinct retail offers, have adequate bandwidth and availability, and all of them will experience congestion during rush hour, consumers might not be extremely motivated to change providers, even if they are unhappy to some degree. The bad news for service providers might be that network quality and reputation have some effect, but not overwhelming effect on churn behavior.

But handsets are a huge motivator of change, it appears. About 38 percent of consumers who switched phones in the past two years did so to get the phone they wanted.

More than 27 percent went shopping with a specific phone in mind, in fact. About 98 percent of iPhone users said they would purchase the phone again. To point out the obvious, some people might be really happy about their handsets, and simply put up with their service providers.

But there is another way to look at matters. If half of consumers are unahppy to some degree, and that leads them to churn, what would one expect to see? At churn rates about 1.5 percent a month,. one would expect roughly 18 percent annual churn. That would roughly equate to 100 percent churn about every five years or so.

If one assumes only half of consumers are motivated to churn, existing churn rates easily could amount to churn of half the entire customer base about every two and a half years.

So maybe those unhappy consumers are in fact deserting their current providers. The reason they remain unhappy? One explanation could be that none of the providers they are trying are demonstrably better than the carriers they left. One often encounters consumers who say "we've tried them all, and all of them have some problems."