Grace:
<Remember the Pentium bug? The busy signal crisis at AOL?>
Yes and yes. Have people stopped buying Intel chips or signing up for AOL? No and no. In fact, they are doing so at faster rates than prior to these crises.
<If you think that 500,000 unhappy customers out of 5 million is OK>
Do I think it's OK? I guess it depends. Of course I'd rather have zero unhappy customers. But that doesn't address my point--sacrafice a "few" unhappy customers (maybe) at the sake of many, many new happy customers. While I applaud (seriously) your business accument and your ability to maintain very satisfied customers, ATHM is playing a much larger game with much different rules. My original question is whether you'd want 5,000,000 subs of which 500,000 were unhappy (but probably not leaving) or 1.8 million subs who were very happy.
I guess I feel that @Home's product is so superior that people that are not immediately satisfied because of technical problems will almost always not leave @Home. 25 million people are not satisfied with AOL on one level or another, yet they generally stay. I'm not saying that AOL doesn't have fairly high attrition, my point is that people who are remotely satisfied with a product (particularly one that they get attached too like an ISP and its e-mail addresses, customization, etc.) usually don't change unless a far superior product is available, either on a cost or performance basis. I don't see that "far superior" product out there, therefore the risk of attrition is minimal, so let's reel in the subs and deal with the problems as they arise. |
