How Karma Took the Steam Out of Loyal Customers
Karma Mobile, a Sprint MVNO used to be surprisingly honest and forthcoming. Now, their culture and philosophy mysteriously changed. Where did it all go wrong?
“How come nobody’s ever whelmed,” Robin asked when realizing that people can be “overwhelmed” or “underwhelmed” during the first episode of Young Justice. Well, I was at one point “overwhelmed” by a mobile service called Karma. At its core, it is a prepaid data service that uses Sprint’s network. Basically, you would prepaid for a bucket of data and when you use it is up to you, as it would never expire. However, it’s also an open wifi network, which means that you would be sharing your signal and bandwidth. The good news is that by sharing your signal, you’ll get credit for doing so, in doing so spreading “karma,” if you will.
The core product was “good enough” for me. It’s not the perfect device as it was a WiMax, but something else attracted me to this company. I went to a meetup with the staff in May 2014 and originally, I went to trade in a Verizon Datastick for their now-retired Karma Classic Hotspot. While I was talking with the staff, I found myself liking the staff members. They were openly honest about what they set out to do — perhaps too honest at times. They talked about looking to get into the LTE market around that time as they saw it was the future, but there would be no announcement of this step for weeks to come. They gave me some exclusive knowledge of the company and it was quite pleasant.
When they finally announce the Karma Go, it took me a minute to save up (even though I had a discount), but I gave them my money in hopes of getting the Karma Go in the time promised. That was October 2014.
However, as of late, they have done some massive missteps, which changed the personality of this company as well.
The first misstep? Underestimating Karma Go’s Production.
Any hardware company that ran a kickstarter would tell you that producing something new in a timely matter is hard (Just ask the creators of Lima, a hard drive plug that can turn a hard drive into a personal cloud. Or even SmartHalo, While it’s currently out, you still have to be on a waitlist for it.). However, if you’re a solid company asking for money for a product with a scheduled release, well… that’s harder. Top it off with doing it directly and not via a Kickstarter and that would be the most difficult thing to pull since people are a little more forgiving with Kickstarters (well, some people. Lima reputation suffered. There’s still a parody site out there teasing about Lima being vaporware. Not to mention the product still doesn’t feel completely ready.)
When push came to shove, the once brutally honest company is now doing something they probably shouldn’t be doing — giving customers the silent treatment. New Year’s came and gone and it would be weeks before we heard from Karma with a serious plan to make up for the lack of real communication. They had a timetable set out and visualized. It won’t be until June 2015 when they finally started to ship the first batch of Karma Gos with their classic WiMax model (and Sprints WiMax Network) was going to sunset in November of that year.
Once they fulfilled all the orders, what was supposed to be their biggest dare yet turned into their second misstep.
“Unlimited Internet” — With A Few Gotchas
No matter what company you are, you can’t be a one-trick pony forever. Prepaid Internet that doesn’t expire is a good deal. But you need to do better than that — you need to offer more. And “Neverstop” was their “more”, which they announced in November 2015.
For $50/month, you can get all the Internet you want to use. However, there were some limits to it. Data was capped at 5 mbps and you can only hook up 3 devices at once. While this sounded good in theory, there was a major problem — some people pushed the limits of their services to the point that the plan would be unsustainable. By the end of the year and with this new plan barely making it to 2 months, they switched gears and started throttling data. Understandably, this upset a lot of people.
Thus, this forced them to re-evaluate their offering because one thing is for sure — how can you call a plan “Neverstop” if the speed feels like it’s close to stopping?
So they retired Neverstop and push on their customers (for better or worse) a new plan called “Pulse”.
However, during their transitions… somewhere in between NeverStop and Pulse, something else changed. Their once busy comments section on their blog just vanished. Technically, it was removed and if you had a Disqus account, you can still see your commentary. They just were no longer accepting comments on their blog. And eventually, along with their new plan, they also have a new outlook on life. And this would be their third and probably biggest misstep.
Putting Premiums on a Hotspot that usually comes standard?
Once Pulse was ironed out and people started using it, they teased new features for their Go device. However, when they finally announced it… something felt off.
First, they changed and redirected the blog traffic to “Medium” (you know, the site you’re reading now) with the commenting system turned off. And second they announced new “Premium features”. However, at first glance, they sound pretty basic. For a monthly fee, you can use your hotspot as a private connection, allowing you to do all the things that you can do with a home router or a hotspot from any other company. If you read the blog post, they sell it like they have great benefits. But let’s be frank… there’s nothing revolutionary about selling basic functionality. And this is when you realize that Karma is starting to not only lose that magical feeling, it replaced it with not regret, but anger.
Karma’s story is pretty much a reminder that at the end of the day, they are a company trying to make a profit with little regards for customer care… or service. And since August, they showed signs of not only growth struggle, but internal struggle as well with customers complaining about not getting refunds, complaints pouring in on social media platforms with very little to say to the public. Steven van Wel, an honest CEO with modest goals left the company silently and almost all the original team members quit. However, you wouldn’t know that unless you know where to look. The new team behind Karma made changes to the core product, where some people are noticing that they are not getting 100MBs for new referrals, instead only get 100MB a month. They are trying every trick in the book to turn Karma into a monthly subscription and make Refuel, the original reason why many people choose Karma, the less attractive option.
So now, we’re all waiting on the rest of Karma’s story because it looks as tho the writing’s on the wall as the New Year begins. Will we see the new team behind Karma come to their senses and try to win back customers by turning their culture around, or will they kill off the few customers that are willing to give them their all?
Only time, as cliche as it sounds, will tell.
Update (5/14/2017): Karma had decided to revamp their offerings. However, they are moving their plans to be more profitable by eliminating “pay as you go” in a silent matter, surprising all customers. My new post will explain this in detail.
