Last week one of our mobile phones died – unfortunately 9 months before the end of a 2 year contract. A quick visit to the O2 store informed me that the only option was to buy a new one (£450) or take out a new contract and continue to pay the old one (net cost, also £450). It was not possible to upgrade or extend the contract or indeed do anything sensible (from my perspective).
So I walked next door, signed up for new phone (£ Free) with Vodafone, called O2 to transfer the number (no attempt to retain me), all sorted.
Now here is the problem – we have 4 phones with O2 (all in my name) which makes me worth over £1000 a year, some of these have been held since mobile phones began (25 years ago?) and could be held for another 25 years which comes to a Lifetime Value of over £50,000.
Had O2 chosen to deploy simple data techniques to amalgamate customer records into a single view they might just have decided that replacing the broken phone was rather a good idea. But that would have meant empowering their high street staff to act – which may be a different problem all together!
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