Dean Bubley: Active customer disloyalty and bundling

Dean Bubley posts at his Disruptive Wireless blog that "with the advent of triple/quadplay services, and the rise of ever-greater competition in the telecom space, there is an increased focus on customer loyalty, minimising churn, and cross-selling. In theory, bundling helps to reduce churn. Some early results from carriers in North America and elsewhere bear this out." Bubley thinks that:

In the case of bundled services and customer lock-in, the resentment will start to simmer when specific service elements are priced wrongly. If I had a quad-play offer, and saw competing prices on mobile telephony falling faster than that tariff I had access to (or broadband speeds being increased more quickly, for example), it would wind me up.

He also points oput that "the risks of heavy-handed lock-in from the lack of "portability" of content, email and so forth. Again, this is likely to ratchet up the "active customer disloyalty" and resentment factor." He then states:

Lastly, there is the issue of poor customer service. I already have my doubts about the ability of some service providers to offer adequate cross-technology support (fancy asking a mobile operator about your problems with Outlook? or asking your broadband provider about hooking up a Bluetooth headset?). I'll add to this the likelihood of crass attempts to cross-sell, abuse of privacy for marketing reasons and so on.

Bubley wonders how the triple/quad-play "will play out in households with multiple family members" with a bunch of different usage models and needs. He concludes that:

Overall, I suspect that while bundling might reduce churn rates in any one single service, reducing price-based "casual churn", it will have the unintended consequence that any act of customer disloyalty will instead be much more "active", based on genuine resentment & distaste. It is also likely to drive up "collateral damage", as such extremely dissatified customers wilfully look to move not just the "offending" service, but related ones in the bundle, plus probably influencing their family members' choices as well. It will also be an awful lot harder to win them back.