Some Bells using wireless stores to sell bundle, Yankee says

BellSouth, Qwest and SBC Communications are beginning to use their wireless sales as a launch pad to sell wireline services, as part of a service bundle, according to a new report out today from the Yankee Group.

Initial efforts to treat wireless service as an add-in to a bundled service that includes voice, DSL and satellite video stumbled over the reality that most consumers purchased their wireless service on a multi-year contract that wasn’t easily or inexpensively broken. Now, says analyst Su Li Walker, some telcos are using their wireless retail stores to sell their wireline service.

“They are beginning to catch on to it and looking at wireless sales on a more strategic basis,” she said. “They noted that adding wireless from the call center is a difficult sell. The consumer is not quite in the mindset to make a wireless change. Instead, they can leverage those wireless retail stores.”

BellSouth has begun putting its own representatives in Cingular Wireless stores, Walker said, and SBC and Qwest are using existing sales people to “up sell” wireless customers as they come in to order service.

“They are focusing on that downtime when you are waiting to get your phone service or waiting to talk with the wireless representative,” Walker said. She notes that it is still early for this type of sale, but that initial feedback is positive.

Verizon is the one former Bell company that is not yet using its wireless outlet to sell wireline service, Walker added, but she expects that to change.

“Internally, they are set up a bit different,” Walker said. “Verizon and Verizon Wireless are not set up to be cooperative – there’s more of a push back and forth so it will be more of a struggle for them to get wireline sales into the wireless stores. But we would expect them to see what everyone else is doing.”

In their competition with cable companies, telcos at least temporarily have a wireless advantage that they need to exploit, Walker concludes. This new sales approach is one way to do that.