TORONTO – In his final annual general meeting as CEO of Rogers Communications, Nadir Mohamed set some ambitious goals for the company for 2013, with the key being a need for much better customer service.
In his speech to shareholders, Mohamed didn’t mince words. “There’s no question we need to significantly improve customer service. We need to help our customers better understand what they get when they sign-up and we need to do a better job supporting them once they do,” he said.
“This year we’re focused on resolving the top reasons customers call, enhancing employee training and raising the bar on service levels, all in the context of our simplification program, to make it easier for our customers to do business with us.”
The outgoing CEO (Mohamed previously announced he will retire in January 2014 and the board of directors is currently working with an executive search firm to find a new chief) added that beyond a better customer experience, the company is focused on four growth areas in 2013: home automation (security, energy management), digital services (from TV to small business solutions), mobile commerce (a Rogers bank, credit card and moving all those plastic loyalty cards inside the phones), and next generation business services (data, voice, cloud, machine-to-machine).
Mobile commerce and business services,, we at Cartt.ca believe, are the two top growth engines for the company. A mobile wallet will see the carrier gain revenue on every transaction made (either from the customer or service providers like Visa) while businesses increasingly want to ditch their telecom and IT departments for an all-in-one business solutions provider – like a wireless company.
“Today the average Canadian carries 22 cards in their wallet. Collectively we’re carrying 675 million pieces of plastic,” said Mohamed in his speech, referencing mobile commerce opportunities.
“Your wireless device already acts as your phone, your camera, your computer – in the next five years it will act as your mobile wallet. For you this means safely storing all your information in one place, from credit cards to transit passes. For Rogers it means a new business that leverages the trusted security of the SIM card. We’ve already partnered with CIBC and look forward to working with all of the other financial institutions.”
On the business side, M2M is growing rapidly. “This year we will reach one million machine to machine connections and revenue will reach $100 million within two years – small numbers that will grow exponentially in the years to come,” added the CEO.
But to do all that, Rogers needs more of its lifeblood: spectrum. However, with the federal government hell-bent on making sure there are four viable wireless companies everywhere, we asked Mohamed during a scrum with reporters on Tuesday whether or not he’s worried about the wireless spectrum transfer review process launched by Industry Canada in the wake of Rogers’ purchase of an option which will let it acquire Shaw Communications’ AWS spectrum when it is allowed to in September of 2014. New entrants which bought set-aside spectrum in the 2008 AWS auction are not allowed to sell to an incumbent for five years after getting the license and Shaw’s expires then.
The move by Rogers and Shaw has not made the federal government very happy, but as we have noted on this site, there may be little it can do about how the industry has developed.
Mohamed hopes all goes as planned and that it can buy Shaw’s western Canadian spectrum, come September 2014. However, “if the government chooses to review it before then, that’s a new thing so we will wait and see if they will actually do that,” he said.
“We’re talking about spectrum that’s actually not being used, not being made available to Canadians today… What we would like to do is put it to use,” he continued. “Wireless data consumption, when we look out the next few years, we see hundreds of percent growth… So by having that spectrum, we can add it to the spectrum position we have and offer the kinds of speeds and throughput and transactions that consumers want – so from that perspective we see it as a win for consumers to get access to it.”
“If that changes, we’ll have to deal with it at that time.”
Mohamed also told reporters he sees an era approaching where people will care far less about smartphone penetration and far more about data consumption by those using their handsets because soon, everyone will have a smartphone and when you hit 100% penetration, growth has to come from someplace else.
“Soon… we’ll start talking about adoption of wireless data and consumption of data, so usage patterns, the ability to absorb applications… whether it’s music, video, or some of the business applications that we’re focused on – you really go from connectivity to applications… and once you get connectivity to the base, what drives the business is what people are using the connections for and that’s a world of difference.”
