“It’s crucial to keep front of mind that, when it comes to MNVOs, you can’t just launch and then stop,” says James Gray, Managing Director at Graystone Strategy. “The work is not done – far from it. At the point of launch, you’ve got no customers to worry about and your competitors aren’t yet a factor. You don’t have to change your point of sale because that’s not even been established yet. Some might even go as far to say that the launch is the easy bit. The day you launch, all your work and efforts start again.”
Now it’s time to look at what’s happening in the market, how are your customers changing, what can you learn through feedback from call centres? “It’s useful to think in terms of an expression used by the forces: no plan survives first contact. What that means is that you can plan everything that’s going to happen but once you go into battle, that’s it – all bets are off and everything can change very quickly.”
This way of thinking can easily be applied to MVNOs. You can launch the strongest proposition in the world, but you can’t sit back and pat yourself on the back and say, ‘job done, let’s come back to this in a year’. Instead, you’ve got to keep monitoring. Not throwing it all away and starting again, but incrementally adapting what needs to be addressed. If you have your targeting right, and your segmentation right, you should, in theory, just need to iterate.
How do you know what to change in this new and uncertain landscape? Simply put, your customers can tell you. As you were – or should have been doing – before, go to the call centres, listen to what people are saying, hear their gripes and, crucially, work out how to delight them. That’s how, as an MVNO, you’ll stay on top.