Truphone goes for the U.S. market
By Dusan Belic on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 9:50 AM PST In Announcements, BlackBerry, CTIA Wireless 2009 @ Las Vegas, Services
During the recently ended CTIA in Las Vegas, Truphone announced that it is entering the U.S. market in a big way. More specifically, the company launched its Truphone Business offering and the Truphone Channel Partner Program in the States.
We’ve already covered Truphone Business in the past, when we’ve talked about the service for the UK market. I’ll only repeat that we’re talking about a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) application that enables business users to make low-cost international phone calls.
At the same time, they announced the Truphone Channel Partner Program to recruit partners to sell and distribute Truphone Business to companies throughout the U.S. As part of the program, resellers are offered generous commission plans according to a tiered structure, as well as a range of sales incentive schemes, co-marketing funds, and a wide variety of marketing support materials.
Additionally, the channel program offers sales and marketing training modules, dedicated channel managers to support partners’ sales teams in addition to secure and easy to use customer management tools to make all order entries, adds, changes, deactivations and trouble ticketing seamless and instantaneous.
Blackberry is getting more popularity now a days and truephone target the right segment to pitch their services. Although their competitors Fring, Vopium, or Jajah has their Blackberry client but truphone can still get their share from this market.
I signed up for Truphone 3-4 days ago with their unlimited plan, and within three days of their launch they have decided to halt their unlimited service. When you call their customer service:US: 1 347 694 5000, they say that they are having some issues with the unlimited service and that some users are abusing it and whatsoever. Their terms says that they consider 3000 minutes to be reasonable allowance, however, I think they have generalized as I have personally made only about 100 minutes worth of calls. Without any prior notification, they not stopped providing service, they instead put me on the standard pay per min plan, unbeknownst to me I kept making calls and kept losing money until this morning. When I called, they said they are going to have some directors meeting come tuesday after easter to decide on the plan.
This is nothing but a big disaster for truphone.
Truphone tried to launch big in US, however, they have failed to deliver their product in the first few days.
Do not sign up, bad bad bad company!!