jkhong's posterous

You’re our customer! We hate you! « Design By Gravity

Stick around awhile, and picture the situation ten years in. After ten years, assuming all the costs stay the same, you get to pay Comcast over $4000 to be their loyal customer! Ten year cost: just over $16,000. Sweet deal. For them. So they hate churn, they want you to stay put. Too bad they don’t make it attractive to stay put.

Every time I see a Comcast ad “For New Customers Only” I have the same thought: why don’t I get a break for being a loyal customer? If they really value my business, how about, oh, a discount based on how long I’ve been with them? Screw new customers, they are likely to leave (chrun!) anyway. Golden-handcuff me with a really sweet deal based on my longevity. To counter the above example, say I had started at $125 a month. Starting in year 3 I got a got a 5% discount each year, up to 30%. Not compounded, additive. So after nine years, I am at a capped at a 30% discount, for a monthly bill of $88.

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Great reminder. Companies (including mine) should do more to value loyal customers as much, if not more, than new customers.

Time to start planning out fresh rewards for loyal users! :)

Q: What's an iPhone developer doing at the Nokia Developers Briefing?

A: Learning :)

And it was quite an interesting experience too. Not going to go into platform debates -- won't work here. But I did observe some really interesting points to learn:

  • Make display booths really, really nice: Each booth had at least 1 LCD TV, showing demos and videos. The main booths were extravagant affairs, with eye-candy models, full color printed booth setups. They really spent on it.
  • Videos - use them! Every Nokia app on demo had videos. Not just product demo videos, but more lifestyle advertising videos. They also had nice "statistics & facts" videos. Simple, just words and illustrations, but the message got across well.
  • Phone -> TV-out for live demos. I *need* to get a video out cable for the iPhone.

Of course, there were briefing sessions too. Learnt a thing or two there. It's really interesting that Nokia is well aware of the inherent problems of their platform (proprietary software OS -- aka poor API?, product fragmentation, unfamiliar tools). They're working to overcome it. In the mean time, I really appreciate developing on the iPhone OS. It's simpler.

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Bonus: @roslanbz gave a talk on funding. Rather, on the potential of mobile apps. Thought the slides really stood out.

What made it really worth the time though, were the people I got to meet. Read somewhere that we should never leave a room full of people until meeting someone new. Totally agree with that. It is a great time to be a developer, entrepreneur and Malaysian.