Why Wireless Retail industry needs to improve: service and support, devices and 5G!
While Apple and Samsung among other manufacturers deliver keynotes year upon year about how amazing their mobile technology is, the burden to sell this new hardware every 12 months is an increasing challenge for the wireless retail industry.
For large players such as Verizon and AT&T their primary focus is to build the infrastructure, since that is what facilitates access to services that have value. Both Verizon and AT&T are also looking at how to create value using cutting edge technologies such as Augmented Reality over 5G networks. In their future innovations the ultimate goal is to have smart and connected homes, cars and people. A statement of this evolution is how AT&T has invested in Magic Leap which just goes to show that these companies have their finger on the pulse when it comes to ‘future experiences’ rather than just raw product or service offerings.
5G is around the corner and the promise of this is a data rich utopia where people can use unlimited amounts of internet and do all this fun stuff on their mobile devices using high level applications and tools like Augmented Reality.
**updated March 1st 2020** Regardless of what wireless carriers believe the future looks like and what the promise of 5G holds for the evolution of technology, the challenges they have towards infrastructure development are very real. At first glance the marketing around early stage 5G phones such as Samsung’s new flagship the S20 recently launched at CES2020 (pictured below) appear to have 5G capability, its main competitor the iPhone has not yet released its own true 5G phone but they are working on their own proprietary processor for it.
The difficulty for OEM manufacturers remains the same, what good is an advanced highly capable mobile device (phone, AR/VR wearable or smartwatch / eye-ware etc.) if the infrastructure cannot yet keep up with the experiences that consumers may want to have using these devices.
Its a question of standards! The general consumer does not really know the difference between the 5G marketing hype ‘which as a service is just an overclocked version of 4G LTE, boosting existing bandwidth or removing current limiters that wireless carriers impose so that they can technically make more money of selling faster speeds and more data at higher costs’ vs. True 5G which is hardware implementation on the physical network that can guarantee gigabit+ bandwidth both upstream and downstream.
Currently Millimeter wave (mmWave) and Low band are the two standards mmWave promises higher speeds but has much lower coverage area and tends to struggle with consistency as far as receiving the signal in high density areas with buildings or penetrating glass and other materials. Low band on the other hand functions more like 4G LTE ‘utilizing essentially the same infrastucture’ to cover more range for the signal and does not struggle in most cases with obstacles that can easily interfere with the signal, however Low Band is much slower: here is some literature to support that:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/t-mobile-5g-secrets-revealed-heres-where-it-doesnt-work-well
T-Mobile which originally sued AT&T for falsely branding 5G has not done any better in its own functional deployment of a true 5G network as proven by verizon in their Ad War See here: https://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/verizon-shoots-first-5g-ad-war-against-rival-t-mobile/2233571
The fact is that the infrastructure for true 5G at scale for any of the carriers including Verizon ‘the largest of them all’ is significantly difficult. One of my other articles points to why.
While the topic of 5G is potentially a number of blogs or even a small book on its own this is only a small part of a bigger wireless industry problem, the other problems I will go through in the remainder of this article.
The corporate retail business which supplies physical mobile products to the market. In addition there are competitors such as T-Mobile, Sprint, Cricket Wireless just to name a few, and then companies like Verizon, have a number of authorized retailers such as Metro, Go Wireless, Victra, RXP Wireless.
But the demands on the wireless industry and their retail operations are increasing, sales targets for GPPSA or (Gross Profit Per Sales Associate) especially in authorized re-sellers can be exceedingly difficult to meet when the market is saturated with mobile products, competition, online retail and a general apathy among the consumer who have been overwhelmed with yearly releases of new phones and have reached a point where many cannot justify spending; “in some cases thousands for new phones” when they already have one that meets all their needs (something that it appears companies like Apple could not care less about).
The recent pains in the wireless industry have been met with several retail store closures in several states, most affected is the Mall retail space where stores have struggled outside peak traffic times such as Christmas.
How sales associates in the wireless industry are taught to swarm upon their customers and push sales with little or no awareness of the customer need and a ‘we told you so in the terms contract’ attitude when a customer opts-out of something they don’t want to pay for and don’t understand, is a very vulture-capitalist business model.
Salary structure in the industry is generally targeted towards younger people, where they start on a minimum wage with incentives in commission for their sales turning these youths into ‘vulture like’ sales people willing to sell a customer on every unnecessary addition such as insurance policies and app services or devices the customer will never use, but the percentages are often misleading compared to the gross margins which each company makes and the hours can be very stressful for the amount of money sales associates make in wireless retail.
The situation gets worse however when we consider the sheer disconnect between how wireless retailers operate and sell products compared to the way the big manufacturers pitch products in the media.
For example for both Samsung and Apple, a few of the key benefits to their new phones the S20 and Apple XR series of phones is Augmented Reality, but barely any training is received for AR apps by sales staff at a retail level, you would never have the experience of walking into a wireless retailer and being sold on the benefits of using Augmented Reality with phones. Nor does the average consumer care about it because they cant identify personal use cases, although if they had knowledge of the capabilities of AR for many things such as shopping for example they may indeed want to use the feature more often, if only customers were made aware but the majority aren’t.
For the teens new phones tend to be all about SNAP chat and Instagram or perhaps Pokemon Go (which is the most popular AR application currently globally) or Fortnite.
For young adults perhaps Google Maps, Web Browsing, Amazon and Tinder tickles your fancy, for the older people most of them prefer the flip phones and are too often complaining about having smart phones and not knowing how to use them, when they do use them its only for making calls anyway and in some rare cases responding to text messages or looking at photos of the grand-kids on Facebook, so data and AR among other fancy stuff on phones is a lost cause with that demographic or the mainstream consumer. It is fair to say the more advanced tech which 5G promises is designed more for the enthusiasts niche market.
Not knowing how to use stuff they are buying or not knowing why they need extra mobile products such as tablets or for what they would use these products are fundamental to consumer apathy, why pay for things you don’t use right?
But before we augment any reality lets be honest about REALITY in wireless! Currently market saturation is real, apathy from mature consumers towards spending more money on devices is real, the bills on some family phone accounts being higher than the monthly mortgage payment or grocery bill is also real and as a result the consumer is just sick of it all!
Often enough what you do get is poorly scripted sales pitches from sales associates at many retailers which focus on sales staff ‘maximizing their commission, or more appropriately the stores profits in an attempt to load product on to the consumer which the consumer cannot understand the value of.
Mobile solutions are very close to going from traditional smart phone devices to wearable devices, it could be a case where wireless retail needs to start taking pages out of the sales manual which sports apparel retailers have and focus on benefits related to experiential selling.
Value is a touchy subject in the wireless industry, there are 0 stores that understand how to sell the value of a product or the experience, the fun stuff, the why and the what is a missed opportunity vaguely described by wireless retailers who outside of sounding like sleazy salesman do little to understand the products they are selling to the customer or how those products should impact their lives.
A modern smart phone is a very powerful device so are tablets for that matter, and on either you can run a business now, among so many other really value oriented features which these devices have.
Perhaps the biggest thing is the lack of effort taken by the wireless industry to really educate their consumer about the products they use. Even on YouTube, I am sick of the UN-boxing videos of new phones and lean more towards videos that actually show me how to do useful stuff with my phone. And this is exactly the mantra which Wireless Sales Associates should be learning for their customers.
The wireless industry faces dramatic times ahead in terms of evolutionary change in product and service offerings. The sales people working in this industry need to move away from manipulation selling and start understanding how to present value effectively.
More Wireless Retailers will close before the lessons are learned and the industry is short of having a crises like the one Toys R Us experienced if it does not wise up to the future of their own technology and how they need to sell the customer experience on it.
Original Article By Neil Singh on October 2, 2018, Updated March 1st 2020.
