Mobile plans: is it easy to check you're on the right one?

Why are we doing this?

In March 2021, the Commerce Commission sent an open letter to the mobile operators. The Commission felt that some consumers could make significant savings from changing plans or providers, but it was hard to make meaningful comparisons. The letter laid out expectations designed to increase transparency in the market, giving mobile customers more power to choose wisely.

The Commission wanted telcos to provide:

• At least 12 months’ usage history – how many megabytes, minutes and texts the customer used – accessible at any time.

• At least 12 months’ spend history - accessible at any time.

• An annual summary of usage and spend, along with a prominent prompt to consider alternatives.

The letter also specified that the information should be simply presented and easily understandable.

At Consumer NZ, we’d also like to see consumers re-evaluating their plans more regularly. The Commission asked us to lend our product testing expertise to assess which companies have best implemented the requirements, 18 months after they were set out.

When should you reconsider your plan?

As with any service, regularly reviewing your phone plan will usually get you a better deal. Maybe you could save a few dollars a month by ditching those international minutes, or maybe there’s a new endless data plan that’s worth upgrading to.

But we’ve found that customers tend to stick with the same plan and provider for years on end. Each year we survey Kiwi consumers about their mobile phone service providers. In the 2021 survey, more than half of all respondents had been with their provider for more than five years.

Under the Commission’s expectations, operators must now send you an annual summary of what you’ve used and spent. That’s a great reminder to search for a better deal, whether that’s a new plan or a different telco.

It’s also easier to tell if your current plan is suitable now you can access your usage and spend history. Just take note of how much you’ve used each month over the past year, then shop around to find the cheapest plan that fulfils your needs. Note that, if you’re regularly making out-of-plan purchases, it might be better value to move to a pricier plan that includes more.

Changing mobile operators is pretty easy in Aotearoa because most plans don’t have fixed-term contracts. However, if you’ve committed to a financing plan on a new mobile phone, you’ll have to pay the rest of that off when you leave.

Otherwise, you can set up an account with your new operator online, over the phone or in store. The new company should help you through the process of moving your phone number across and cancelling your current plan. You might have to complete a credit check.

How did each provider do?

We looked at the app and annual reminder for each provider, assessing how much information is provided, how understandable it is, and how easy it is to find. Our overall score puts more emphasis on the quality of the app, because that's accessible all year round.

Spark

Mobile app: 64%
Annual notification: 66%
Overall rating: 65%

It takes three taps from the home page of Spark’s app to reach a screen where you can inspect your historical usage and spend. Spark feels the information is in the right place because it’s not a task customers perform often. We wonder if the feature would be used more if it was easier to find.

The information is good, once you locate it. Monthly averages are prominent on the page. Usage can be summarised by day, month or a whole year, and up to six months of data can fit on the screen at once.

Spark takes a unique approach to the annual reminder requested by the Commerce Commission. Rather than producing a snapshot to summarise the past year, Spark simply sends a text message directing customers to check their mobile app or web portal.

We’d prefer something in a static form such as email because that’s more accessible. However, Spark says the message gets better click-through rates than many of its other text alerts. Using text also lets Spark send the prompt to all its customers, rather than only those that have provided an email address.

Spark tells us the SMS is an interim measure while it builds a curated annual email that ‘detects’ if a customer is on a mismatched plan and suggests a better one. It’s due to be ready in 2023. We’re looking forward to seeing the new system, but it didn’t factor into our rating.

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Vodafone

Mobile app: 50%
Annual notification: 84%
Overall rating: 62%

Vodafone’s annual reminder arrives as an email, and forms a fairly comprehensive summary. The highlight is the prompt to consider changing plans, which lays out details of Vodafone’s other plans. It would also be easy to use the email to shop around competitors, since it leads with your average monthly usage. All of Vodafone’s plans (except for discontinued legacy plans) feature endless data, calls and texts, but usage information is still valuable for telling consumers how much full-speed data they need.

The Vodafone app is less welcoming. While usage data is accessible from the home screen, we had to scroll past an ad to get to it. The app only displays usage from the previous two months, as well as your current billing period. Three months of data isn’t enough to see seasonal variations. Suppose you use more data over summer because you spend less time at home. If you check the Vodafone app in winter, you might incorrectly deduce that you can lower your data throttling cap.

Spend data requires an extra tap from the usage screen. It only includes overspend – how much you’ve been charged above and beyond your monthly charge – and again, only over the last three months.

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2degrees

Mobile app: 90%
Annual notification: 73%
Overall rating: 84%

Through its history as a smaller challenger, 2degrees claimed user-friendly design and transparency as a point of difference against the established players. 2degrees felt it already fulfilled many of the Commission’s requirements before it was asked.

Indeed, the 2degrees app is excellent for keeping track of your behaviour. Both usage and spend are accessible with a single tap from the home screen. Data stretches back for 12 months and is simple to understand.

The annual prompt from 2degrees also takes the form of an email. It includes good stats on usage over the past 12 months, but is let down somewhat by its spend information. Rather than summarising what you’ve spent over the past year, 2degrees instead provides a projected spend over the coming year based on your current plan.

2degrees says this is due to a technical difficulty because its billing and email systems don’t talk to one another. It also points out that historical spend information is all there in the app.

The email also suffers from a lack of trend data, instead opting for a set of slick infographics that summarise a year’s worth of information into a single number.

What we learned

The mobile network operators told us, with varying degrees of subtlety, that they don’t think users really care about looking at historical usage or spend.

Vodafone said its customers never mentioned transparency when asked about pain points, and there were other app improvements it would rather spend money on. Spark said looking at historical data is a sporadic action in its app. And 2degrees said its customers didn’t ask to have usage front and centre, but it thought it was the right thing to do anyway.

We don’t agree with the claims the telcos have made. Phone plans can cost $100 a month, which is a significant expense. Consumers do care about paying too much, and usage and spend information is a key factor in determining the best plan for their budget. We think many simply don’t realise how these tools empower them to make better decisions.

Customers might also lack awareness of what other plans are out there, and what they’re missing out on. Hopefully, the new annual prompts change that.

One telco told us its prepay customers were more proactive, adding and removing options to match their changing usage over time. That makes sense, because customers are able to top up different amounts and buy different plans each month. Prepaid service can also cost less if you’re careful, so perhaps it attracts those with tighter budgets.

However, it also implies that switching from a monthly plan to a prepay set-up might free you up to better manage what you spend on your phone – provided you have the time to do so.

Regardless, we encourage you to check your plan at least once a year to make sure it continues to meet your needs.

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Thanks to the Commerce Commission

The Commission engaged us to undertake this review and allowed us to unlock it for the benefit of all New Zealanders.