TORONTO – Don’t look for a big marketing splash from Bell Canada to sell its newly announced Bell Digital Voice.
According to Kevin Crull, Bell’s president, consumer solutions, the new local phone option rolled out just last week doesn’t make economic sense to push like crazy.
Crull told a gathering of bankers and investors at the BMO Nesbitt Burns Media and Telecom Conference Tuesday that BDV, which comes in two VOIP flavours (one lite, a-la Vonage, the other much more robust) and at a substantial discount, will be used to retain “vulnerable” customers.
Since Bell Digital Voice offers about a 25% discount over Bell’s regular PSTN service and BDV lite is about half-off, heavily marketing the thing to customers paying, say, $80 a month is a bad idea.
“You won’t see us mass-marketing Bell Digital Voice,” said Crull.
“If a customer is on the way out the door to a cable offering, a big part of the messaging… is that if you’re interested in saving a few bucks and you want the power of voice over IP… you don’t have to go to cable – it’s available from Bell,” he explained.
Left unsaid is the individual timing of such messaging since contacting a customer who’s already decided to switch and offering a new deal is a no-no under the Commission’s win-back rules. By some earlier comments though, we’re sure Crull meant that Bell would be active in pushing vulnerable, or single-product customers (i.e. the ones most likely to leave) to BDV.
“We intend to use it as a retention tool for highly vulnerable customers,” he added.
It’s not going to be easy to monitor the metrics and make sure BDV is working. Crull mentioned weekly or even daily analysis because if Bell is only signing up two vulnerable customers in every 10 taking BDV, it’s undercutting itself on its good customers, “and the economics are not great,” he said.
“If half (of BDV customers) are people I expected to lose and half are ones I would have kept, you start to get to a break-even set of economics,” he added. “If we’re protecting eight of 10 who are vulnerable though, then that’s a really nice model.”
– Greg O’Brien
