T-Mobile releases Q4 subscriber stats from 2008
It’s no secret that 2008 wasn’t kind to most major corporations around the world. Unfortunately, as the year-end reports have been trickling in over the last couple of days, we’ve gotten a healthy look at just how bad many of our favorites fared. While T-Mobile has yet to release their actual financials, we’ll have to wait until the 27th of February for that pleasure, the company has gone ahead and released its subscriber stats for the 4th Quarter of 2008. During Q4 the company added 621,000 new customers. Progress is something, but compare this to the 671,000 added during Q3 2008, as well as the whopping 951,000 added during Q4 2007, and the picture gets a bit more bleak. New contract additions were up 43%, compared to 44% in Q3 and 77% in Q4 2007. Blended churn was up just a bit at 3.3% compared to 3% in Q3 and 2.8% in Q4 2007, but it looks like the company is doing a decent job retaining its meager customer base. At the end of the day, we can probably chalk much of this up to the economy at large, but it’s still a bit disheartening to read yet another example of our financial woes. On the other hand, T-mobile seems relatively optimistic about their prospects in the coming year, given plans for an increased 3G footprint, coupled with a lower-than-average pricing and new device introductions. We’re not so sure this is terribly realistic, but we’ve got a whole year ahead for them to prove us wrong.
BGR is sucha a TMO and VZ carrier ho, it’s fun to read the agenda on their articles. Let’s look at the numbers, 3.3% church being refered to as respectable? That’s 1.09 Million customer LEAVING TMO every quarter… so in order to have a net growth of the 621k they got, they actually had to activate about 1.7 Million customers.
Compare their churn % with the big two.
That means that
I wish I knew where all this great customer service at T-Mobile was. I’ve never seen it. You know why the ETFs are so high for TMO? Because it’s WORTH IT!. I took 150 lines away last month. After getting a bill 4 weeks late, error-ridden and in Spanish, I knew I was done.
So the economy is hurting everyone, most people are going to look fro better deals. I know a lot of people that would sacrifice fancy smartphones to save $10-$20 on their wireless bill. That said, I predict that T-Mobile’s subscriber count will actually increase the next few quarters as customers look for better deals. That is so long as their plans stay low-priced. What they should do is stop following the herd & lower their “per-sms” rates back to $0.05/ message. I’ve worked for three of the four & I you’d be suprised at how many people left whenever the sms cost went up regardless of sms/mms plans available or ETF’s. That would be real competition.
There has been a definite degradation in the quality of customer service coming from T-Mobile. In 2003, I moved a small business account with about eight lines to T-Mobile, and their customer service then was nothing short of amazing. More recently, I have been helping a friend with a string of issues he’s having at T-Mobile, and the number of “accidental” call disconnects I’ve seen from T-Mobile is only rivaled by the number of unkind, unhelpful, or outright rude representatives.
I have always been a cheerleader for T-Mobile. I agree with the earlier comment that we need to promote competition within the wireless industry. But, until I see some marked improvement from T-Mobile on the customer service front, I just can’t, in good conscience, keep recommending them at this point.
All that to say: T-Mobile has fallen far. Losing just a bit shy of two million (gross) lines a quarter isn’t great. The iPhone and the Storm are undoubtedly a driver of those defections, but once upon a time I know most people would never leave T-Mobile for another carrier because they couldn’t put up with the inferior customer service on the other side. Now that T-Mobile’s customer service is (at best) no better than anywhere else, what’s the incentive? None. And that worries me, for T-Mobile’s sake.