Rogers announced their Q4 2015 earnings, and while they increased 3-percent in overall revenue from last year to $3.45 billion, their adjusted net income of $331 million or $0.64 per share was down 7-percent. Rogers claims this was due to programs focusing on customer retention, greater advertising and lower TV and home phone sales. As far as the home phone sales go, they should be figuring losses in each subsequent quarter. People are going mobile, and just as in the past few years, Rogers’ main growth was spurred by a four percent increase over last year in their wireless division. The company lost 58,000 customers Q4 2014, but gained 31,000 customers Q4 2015. It helped that their churn rate – customers leaving the company – was only 1.35-percent…Telus still holds the record at only 0.97-percent churn rate. Rogers claims their improved customer service has led to a 26-percent decline in complaints and a 12.7-percent decline in customers contacting the company.
It was in May of 2014 when the new President and Chief Executive Officer of Rogers Communications, Guy Laurence, introduced us to their new plan of business, Rogers 3.0. One of the seven principals was “Overhaul the Customer Experience” and Guy announced at this current meeting, “Overall, we delivered steady results in a fiercely competitive quarter, including strong results in Wireless and Internet, where we maintained momentum in subscriber and financial metrics. We continued to make strong progress on postpaid churn thanks to the success of our customer propositions and customer experience improvements. Whilst we are making good progress, we aren’t resting on our laurels, and we recognize there is more work to do. We delivered on our full-year guidance and our strategy continues to gain traction in the market. We enter 2016 with an outlook of continued growth and remain focused on delivering year two of Rogers 3.0.”
This new competition is going to be “the new normal” playing field according to Guy and that new aggressiveness between Rogers, Telus and Bell “reached new levels in December and [will] continue that way.” The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) was definitely a factor in the fourth quarter, although all of the Big Three virtually eliminated BYOD benefits during their recent price increases…across the board for all companies. Rogers also announced that 25-percent of their postpaid customers, or 2.3 million, have now signed up for its Roam Like Home program. We just reported that they increased the number of new countries it was available, including Russia, China, India and Australia.