You know you are visiting...

You know you are visiting a company that have wealthy customers if, the "how to get there by air" instructions in it's location map says:

Commercial Flights - Heathrow, Birmingham or Luton Airports.

Private jets or light aircraft - Kidlington Airport.

Private helicopters - Grid reference SP 345 540.

Reminded me of an entry in another blog, which was in some ways similar to this, and was posted some time ago:Techie Talk.

PS: Not that you are going to think I was going there as a customer but just in case, I was going there to visit a friend. And these directions are for Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin factory in UK.

Matchstick and the Internet

What can possibly connect the two.

Well, both these inventions are not patented. Apparently, the inventor of matchstick decided that the invention was for the wider good of mankind and patenting it would restrict its use and prevent people from expanding on its use. Internet or WWW inventor Tim Berners Lee also had a similar theory around patenting the internet.

Imagine how the world would have been had these guys patented their inventions. I would be sitting here and writing this blog or if I was I would be doing it not today but possibly 10 years later and paying for it. The water heater at my home wouldn't have started up without that elusive matchstick and anything hot really would have been too hot to handle.

Customer Service Costs

In a bold move, Sprint Nextel recently decided to terminate the connection of 1000 subscribers because they were making far too many calls to customer service. Apparently because of the calls to the customer service centres these customers were costing more than the revenue brought in by them.

It is a bold move and opens door for discussions on customer profitability and possibly impact how companies look at ARPU. May be the industry will come out with a new metric APPU - Average Profitability Per User.

ARPU has in the past been accused of being a creation of the west. Companies in the western world have a high customer set up/acquisition cost due to features such as credit facilities on minutes of use and providing handset subsidies. ARPU was created, as some might argue, to show they could generate future cash flow from their investments on customers. In the developing world, however, customers are usually prepaid and more or less cover the marginal cost required to acquire them and become profitable from day one and hence in spite of low ARPU's companies survive.

HT: IDC, Telecommunication Magazine