AT&T's Next Big Stab at T-Mobile Takes to the Text Message

AT&T has been seen, of late, taking on competitor T-Mobile with a variety of different tools. Price cutting, expansions in phone lines, some really quite impressive incentive packages...all of these things were brought in and phased out over the course of months to get people's attention away from the newly-minted “uncarrier.” Now, AT&T has a new arrow to pull from its quiver, and this time, it focuses on the text message.

The new strategy is set to roll out by February 28, and in so doing will drop some prices on international communications. Those customers on AT&T Mobile Share plans will be able to send an unlimited number of text messages to nearly every country on the planet at no extra charge. Unlimited texting is a fairly common perk of mobile plans, but it's not commonly the case for texts that would be leaving the country. While that's a pretty useful advance for some users, it's not the only one AT&T's set to bring out.

AT&T also dropped prices on making calls to several different places, including Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico, down to one cent per minute, when users take a plan that costs $5 a month. These are price drops from earlier plans, as the plans in question ran $10 a month previously.

AT&T, according to AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega, is “...always looking for ways to keep our customers happy,” and noted that its offer was “...better than T-Mobile's, because on ours it isn't just landlines, it includes mobile as well.” T-Mobile is certainly worth comparing against, as the company has gained 2.1 million customers over the last three quarters alone, by some reports. That in turn has had some effect on AT&T's growth numbers, as earlier this month the company reported signing up 566,000 contract wireless customers in the fourth quarter of 2013. That compares to 780,000 the same time in 2012, and the stock prices have responded accordingly. AT&T's stock is down about nine percent on the past year, while T-Mobile's has shot up fully 62 percent.

It's worth handing it to AT&T on this one for its sheer willingness to try just about anything to find what customers want and respond accordingly. That's real dedication to the customer base, even if most of that was prompted by the efforts of T-Mobile, with the other competitors in the field chiming in if at a lesser extent. AT&T wants to not only bring in new customers but hold onto its old customers, and as such is looking to offer up just about anything it reasonably can offer to keep customers sticking around. The key point to remember here—not just for AT&T but for most any other business—is to focus on the value proposition. How can this product, this service, prove more valuable to the customer than the customer would get out of holding on to his or her cash? Once that question is answered successfully, then the floodgates can be effectively opened on how many customers can be realized.

But AT&T is getting in there and taking its cuts, so hopefully it will find that point that tips the scales in its favor over its competitors and hold its position, or potentially even move up into Verizon's old number one slot. The effort is certainly there; now to see how the results stack up.