Vodafone has announced today what was already anticipated by the registration of its subsidiary ‘Vodafone Energía’ in the Mercantile Registry a few months ago: the british operator enters the energy sector to market electricityand also, in this case, 100% renewable and at market price as announced by the telecom, whose new Electricity Rate arrives variable and with hourly discrimination, contractable from autumn.
This move is not surprising. The telecoms sector has been filled with similar proposals: Pepephone opened the can with the launch of PepeEnergy in 2015, MásMóvil bought Lucera to launch its energy subsidiary, Yoigo announced EnergyGO and Telefónica joined forces with Repsol to do the same, although oriented towards use of solar panels, also for companies.
friction issue
Not only is it not surprising that a teleco offers energy, but It is already customary for a telecom to offer more and more services that have nothing to do with telecommunications. Although the official argument usually speaks of offering “added value” to the client, and this is not false, the movement has more to do with consolidate your customer base by adding a lot of friction to a porting process.
Mobile portability is almost visceral, the process is quick and they don’t have too much friction. And the one they have is very affordable in exchange for scratching a few euros month after month or getting many more gigabytes at the same price.
Fiber ports are no longer so fast: they require more reflection and overcoming a certain laziness, as well as letting the installer go home and watching for all that time until the router’s LED turns green.
The friction of the latter helped to curb the former when the convergence trend began ten years ago, with Movistar Fusión, now reformulated as ‘My Movistar’. That was not the main reason for jumping on the bandwagon of bundling rates, but it did become a desirable consequence, something that Manuel Hernández, CEO of Finetwork, mentioned in an interview with Xataka end of 2021.
In recent years, the measures to raise the average ticket and incidentally complicate customer leakage have been aimed at accumulate satellite services around the same bill. Both through alliances with companies from other sectors and by integrating OTTs (those that until four days ago were seen by some leaders in the sector as the enemy).
And from many partners
It is no longer just a matter of building our own services with original productions or purchases of sports rights, what comes from outside is also added. Some examples of the main operators:
- Movistar: Netflix, Disney+, DAZN, Xbox Game Pass, Movistar Salud (service provided by Teladoc), Prosegur Alarms, Movistar Money (personal loans), Movistar Cloud, Secure Connection, Telefónica Seguros…
- Vodafone: V-Home, Vodafone Care, IoT services, HBO Max, Securitas Direct…
- Orange: Orange Bank, Mobile Insurance, Smart Home, Orange Insurance, Netflix, Amazon Prime…
- Moremobile Group: Agile TV, MoneyGO, EnergyGO, HomeGO, SafeGO, DoctorGO, PepeEnergy, MásMóvil Energía…
Any possible future addition that makes minimal sense to fatten the monthly bill with more services and subscriptions will be added by one or more in the coming yearsfrom a flat rate for legal assistance to a more aggressive approach to insurance or an online agency that includes basic services for the self-employed and micro-businesses.
Laziness, the seventh deadly sin, is the best ally of telecoms to package services and retain customers, already shielded from impulsive portability
If you are lazy to process a fiber portability, much more so to change the provider of seven different services in one fell swoop. In addition to the fact that we will hardly receive facilities for it. Incoming partners also receive very high exposure to their services, albeit at the cost of very tight teleco customer revenue.
For those who do not even want to hear about these satellite proposals, there are often secondary brands of the large operators. Case of Telefónica and O2 or Vodafone and Lowi, to give two examples, which remain focused on very competitive rates, without the need to go ultra low cost, and free of associated services. The operators themselves often speak of shifting towards the main ones towards those who want a “more premium” experience, paradoxically sometimes the added value is in not receiving proposals by phone or decorating the web where you can check the bill. matter of taste
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism