Prepaid customers prefer unlimited plans

pay as you go phone services. So who has a better time with their prepaid services, per minute subscribers, or unlimited subscribers? It looks like unlimited takes it on this one. This is done on a 1,000 point scale, where unlimited beat per minute customers 764 to 717. The criteria is based on call quality, company image, cost of service, account management, initial activation, service plan options, and customer service — weighed in that order. So I guess Virgin Mobile and Net10 did a good job with timing their roll-outs. Both have introduced unlimited calling plans within the last month. According to the report, most people cited the cost of service as their top reason for satisfaction with unlimited plans. It’s nice, really, not having to worry if you’re running out of minutes or text messages. Considering the prices on unlimited plans, they’re starting to make more and more sense. Thankfully, people are catching on.

“Prepaid customers are clearly responding favorably to these unique service plan options, as they provide a cost-effective alternative to traditional price-per-minute plans that are typically offered and allow customers freedom from worrying about being charged extra fees for making too many calls within a given time period,” said Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and Associates. “Although plans with unlimited minutes typically have geographic restrictions for placing and receiving wireless calls, they still fulfill customer expectations and tend to meet a specific service need better than other wireless plans. In fact, 46 percent of unlimited plan customers have completely replaced their traditional landline phone with wireless service, compared with only 13 percent of traditional pay-as-you-go customers.”

When looking at these surveys, we have to remember the inherent biases within them. For instance, in this survey company image was taken as the second weightiest criteria. If we were running the survey, we’d have ranked cost of service right behind call quality, and customer service directly after that. In fact, here’s the whole order: Call quality, cost of service, customer service, service plan options, account management, initial activation, company image. I’m not quite sure why company image is weighed so heavily, but it seems to have little bearing on the intention of this survey. Are there any prepaid users out there who have tried both unlimited and per-minute plans and want to weigh in?]]>