I did not wait hours in line, or have to pay an outrageous price. I simply walked into the Apple store, and they had a pile of them sitting their ready for purchase. I’ve been waiting for the iPhone. Not because it is one of the coolest gadgets to hit the market in a while, but because as a long-time Mac user, the world of PDA’s has always been a difficult one to navigate, since PDA’s are PC centric (the exception being a TREO that worked great for me as a PDA…it just didn’t work as a phone).
I arrived home with the beautiful black box, designed and packaged in true Apple fashion. I opened the box, connected it to the Mac. They way the iPhone works is that when you take it out of the box, you plug it into your Mac (or those of you less fortunate your PC) and it syncs to ITunes to activate the phone (very cool). My excitement was palpable, and then AT&T had to ruin my day.
Let me start by saying we have been AT&T (or Cingular) customers for some time, and I think, as cell phone companies go, they are great. We have been through Nextel and Verizon and so far the service has been better and the support has been good. We have a corporate account, and all of the employees that have phones are on the account (including myself).
So I plug in to sync, and I get this screen
that tells me the phone can’t be activated, that as a business
customer, I either need to go into a store or call the business center.
I call the business center, and get right through. The very polite rep on the other end said, "oh, iPhones cannot be on corporate account"s. Since corporate accounts are discounted, and iPhones don’t qualify for discounts, if I want to activate it, I have to cancel my corporate account and move to an individual plan (costs more, and adds one more piece of accounting work for our accounts payable department). I told him I thought this was ridiculous, and he informed me that there was a 14-day return policy on the phone. I would only have to pay a 10 percent restocking fee (the rep told me about 1 in 10 of the corporate users do. Of course you only find all this out after you open the box.
Wow. Take one of the most exciting product launches in history, and put it in the hands of a bureaucratic monopolistic organization like AT&T and they forget that part of marketing is getting customers to want to keep doing business with you (not just locking them into a new two year deal). Don’t gouge your very best customer (large ones who have many phones) to make a few more bucks in the current quarter. At some point, Apple is going to want to sell these to other cellular providers, and the market is going to open up, so the field will not be AT&T’s forever.
Well, the phone is cool. Apple outshined themselves. Too bad the first impression of the provider (which based on the fantastic sign up/syncing process through ITunes could have been a fantastic user experience and provided AT&T a chance to polish their brand) was ruined by poor marketing on AT&T’s part.
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