Tesco supports m-retail... or does it?

For those of you who don't know already, I spent the best part of 10 years of my working life in retail - mostly fashion, and mostly in and around London's Oxford Street and Knightsbridge. Later on in my career, I worked for ZagMe, the location based marketing company who marketed to customers via SMS at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls, and much of that time was spent working with retailers creating and running campaigns for them. So I have more than a passing interest in things retail.

So I've been keeping an eye on the m-retail or m-commerce world and was very interested to see that UK grocery retailer, Tesco has joined the world of m-retail after successful trials of ordering flowers via mobile for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

As an aside, Tesco also claims that it's wap portal is a great success attracting over 300,000 customers in December last year. And not only that, but that's it's customers are hungry for ads.

"Banner advertising served up on the portal delivered a click-through rate to tailored WAP campaign sites of between three and seven per cent, said Tesco. Brands advertising on the portal included Bee Movie, ITV, Nivea and Teletext.

Tesco said the user-base of the portal has a strong segment of female household budget owners with an average age of 36 - a demographic it said is particularly valuable for fast-moving consumer goods such as toiletries and cleaning products.
According to a survey commissioned by Tesco, more than half (60 per cent) of portal users are female and the same percentage said they visit the portal at least once a month, while 69 per cent claimed they would click on a relevant advert."

So this all bodes well for entering the world of m-commerce. So I thought I'd check it out.

Alas for me, going to http://www.tesco.com/ from my mobile takes me to the main Tesco website with no adaption for the mobile screen whatsoever - large file sizes (well comparatively large when dealing with mobile), navigation required up/down and left/right so you can't actually see anything properly.

It occurred to me that they'd probably done a mobile specific site so I also tried http://www.tesco.mobi/ and http://m.tesco.com/ and neither of those worked.

So it looks like I can't do a review of the service for you.

I then thought, well maybe it's for Tesco Mobile customers only (Tesco Mobile being the pay as you go MVNO with O2), especially since their wap portal has been such a success.

And then I saw how much data charges were on Tesco Mobile... £4 per megabyte. Yes, that's right, a whopping £4 a megabyte. And there's no mention of whether or not access to the Tesco Mobile Portal is free of charge or not. In fact, there's no mention at all of any Tesco Mobile Portal or any Tesco mobile shopping service.

There's a free Tesco sim offer on at the moment, I may give it a go although I really don't fancy spending £4 a megabyte to check out their mobile portal and m-commerce offerings.

On the commercial side of the equation, I know that 02 is heavily pushing mobile retail services and is touting Tesco as it's major success story and case study (there's even a video I've seen about it). But if you're going to make your shop invisible and then charge for entry, isn't that just a bit daft?

Hmm. What's going on?

If anyone can shed any light on what's going on with Tesco m-retail and Tesco's wap portal and relevant data charges, please let me know either via the blog or via email.

And on a parting note, I think this quote (via Silicon.com) from Ashley Schofield, head of customer management at Tesco Mobile, is somewhat ironic:

"Our customers are showing a real appetite for more products and services
through the mobile internet. Delivering more great experiences and value through
our portal is a priority for this year."

Ashley, I'm not sure how you can deliver more great experiences and more value through the portal when you're charging £4 a megabyte.

Another case of billshock

Billshock is an oft-used term in mobile circles to describe what happens when you use data services without having any kind of data plan in place and you suddenly get stung for a bill of, what can be, hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.

I've had billshock in the past and it wasn't pleasant. But it wasn't extreme as the case Ian Delaney is currently experiencing.

In short, he was sold an upgrade by one of Carphone Warehouse's telesales team and sent a swanky new Nokia N95 on trial for 14 days. In getting the upgrade, Ian also committed to a monthly data plan. Ian uses the phone to its full effect and tried out lots of lovely new data services. And was enjoying what the mobile internet had to offer.

What he wasn't counting on was having his service cut off very suddenly when trying to make a call and to be told that the reason was that he had a bill of around £500 to pay. On investigation, it seems that the data plan wasn't immediately effective and so billshock ensued, to the tune of £500 or so.

Ian has been trying, so far in vain, to get this sorted out. And he describes, in some detail, the hoops he's had to jump through. I think he's justified in getting annoyed about this because as far as he was concerned, he had an unlimited data plan and no-one told him any different. Of course, navigating the customer services people at Carphone Warehouse is proving very tricky as you'll see from his blog post.

I don't condone what Carphone Warehouse and O2 is doing. They're both at fault.

1. There is no point sending out a fancy new phone with a new contract in place but not have that contract actually in place for another two weeks. That's just daft.

2. O2 should not be allowing its customers to run up such uncharacteristically high bills for data usage. Why not send a courtesy text message or phone call to alert the customer as to what's going on? It's not that hard to do is it? It's common courtesy.

3. Carphone Warehouse should take responsibility for this and apologise to Ian and find a way to cancel the debt owed and start afresh. I'm guessing that it's actually O2's billing system that's at fault and that it's just not that easy to write off a debt of this nature. The reason pre-pay has been so popular in the UK is that, historically, it was harder to get a mobile phone contract than a credit card so it was just simpler to go to your local supermarket, Superdrug or phone shop and get a phone off the shelf without worrying about credit checks and onerous contracts.

4. Customer service is hard to manage when you have no control about the kinds of decisions you're allowed to make to keep the customer happy and to do the right thing. I've been a retail manager and I know what it's like to be dictated to as to what you could and couldn't do to make things right when they sometimes go wrong. You get a lot of responsibility but no control or autonomy. And that's very stressful. There are so many processes and checks to follow that it becomes very long-winded and almost impossible to manage.

Ultimately, both O2 and Carphone Warehouse need to sort this out. And not just Ian's individual case, but the whole issue around billshock and data charges. To still be suffering this nonsense in 2008 when we've had mobile data services for several years now is just plain daft and it's hampering growth in the mobile data sector.

I wonder when Ofcom will do something about this?

Heated debate about i-mode's exit from the UK

One of the newsgroups I belong to, focussed on the mobile market in Japan, is up in arms about this article from El Reg claiming that it's cultural differences that have determined the success of i-mode in Japan. Unfortunately, the myths about Japanese life today still exist and the writer of the article has succumbed to them in terms of the Japanese not having home computers and the like (except that you can get rather nice laptops these days to desk top real estate isn't the issue it was 10 years ago). Not what one would expect from El Reg but hopefully it's a one-off.

Anyway, it prompted me to think about why i-mode failed in the UK...

1. It was an exclusive deal with o2 so had no chance of gaining critical mass. There were probably folks on other networks who would be interested, but not if it meant switching networks. AFAIK, there was little marketing effort to move existing o2 customers to i-mode and instead the marketing effort that I was exposed to was about recruiting new customers and it is common knowledge that it is way more expensive to recruit a customer than to retain one.

2. There is little awareness in the UK as to what i-mode is unless you happen to work in the mobile industry or are really geeky about mobile phones (in which case, you're probably working in the mobile industry!). I know of a few folks who had i-mode phones for testing but it never became their primary phone.

3. Timing was out. We were already in the start of the 3G world in the UK by the time i-mode came out. Why are you going to go 'back' to 2.5G/i-mode when you can have the overhyped wonders of the 3G world? The network operator Three had already spent millions on extolling the virtues of 3G so the i-mode message was lost in translation

What do you think? Was i-mode always on a hiding to nothing in the UK or could/should it have worked if handled differently?

Text message storage from O2... but not until May

I've been reading about O2 opening up its Bluebook for its customers over at 160 Characters. The bluebook account offers 1000 MB of storage space for important text messages, pictures or video clips. Photos taken from cameraphones can optionally be opened up to be viewed online by others (I'm guessing flickr or moblog stylee) and also sent directly to Kodak for printing. The service launched on the 11th January and to begin with, users must send in their content back to the server using a free shortcode 40202.

In the next phase in May, messages will automatically be cached which I think is great. I'd love to be able to get my messages either as an email or some kind of online store so that I can search them from time to time. Often there are phone numbers to be retrieved, or simply text messages you want to treasure (like the service currently offered by treasuremytext). In addition, in this next phase, customers will be able to store their contacts and other blogging features will be incorporated. I was initially skeptical of this, but actually, O2 has done a pretty good job, by all accounts, of LookAtMeTV which is another of their community efforts.

Of course, you can already store your contacts online for free at Zyb and also that's an additional benefit if you download Shozu to your phone so you don't *need* to switch to O2 to get the service. Oh and did I mention, Shozu and Zyb are also free? There is also a new kid on the block for mobile storage and that's Mobyko which seems to me to do the same as Zyb. Mobyko claims an ability to store your texts, pictures and videos, but you have to send them on to a long number so there's a cost to send so it's not really a full syncing service. Still, it was as fast as Zyb so worth a try.

Still, at least this is progress (albeit, I've been backing up my phone book on Shozu and Zyb for some time now). But I love the idea of AUTOMATICALLY storing your messages - that's a definite plus factor for me. So come on T-Mobile. If O2 can do it, so can you. Instead you have an incredibly difficult log-in process, that's so tricky and archaic (if you don't log in correctly, they have to send you your password by post), I've NEVER actually managed to log in to it despite being a customer for 5 years or more! So it *could* be quite a leap for T-Mobile to do something like this. I live in hope!