Results from our Survey about Tracfone and our Readers
A few weeks back we created survey for our readers to take to help us get a better idea of who our readers were, what they are interested in, and ways we can improve the Smartphone Info blog. We received over 260 responses in about a week, and a lot of helpful information.We want to share some of the more pertinent pieces of information from the survey with our readers as we found it very interesting and thought you might as well. You can go back and see the original post about the survey here, but it is no longer possible to take the survey.
We will start by just looking at the first five questions from the survey, as they are more generalized.
Question 1 - How Long have you been Using Tracfone?
In the first question of our survey we wanted to get a better idea of how long people have been using Tracfone. We were quite surprised that the majority of respondents to the survey (55%) had been using Tracfone for six years or more. Another 30% have used Tracfone for three to five years. |
| How Long Have You Been Using Tracfone? |
- Most readers on this blog are 'savvy' consumers and long-term Tracfone customers
- Tracfone Isn't attracting many new customers
We believe both statements may be partially true. Apparently America Movil, Tracfone's parent company, did lose almost half a million subscribers in the US during the first quarter of 2016 according to an article on FierceWireless. Tracfone and Safelink were where most of these subscriber losses occurred, but America Movil also owns Straight talk and several other prepaid cell phone companies. Overall, America Movil has over 26 million users in the US across all their MVNO brands.
So, while Tracfone hasn't had the best year so far, we expect they are doing fine, and will be working hard to attract more new customers (hopefully with new and improved smartphones).
Question 2 - Why Do you use Tracfone?
To help understand what is important to our readers, we asked, 'Why do you use Tracfone?'. The answers were fairly consistent with what we expected, with the most popular answer being the low cost.Take a look at the graph below for the full breakdown.
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| Why do you Use Tracfone? |
Some of the 'Other' responses included those who use Tracfone for multiple reasons, like low cost and low use.
With the majority of people choosing Tracfone because of the low cost, we have to wonder why Tracfone released the expensive Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Galaxy S6. But perhaps they are just trying to appeal to the small segment of consumers who are willing to spend on a high-end device, but still want to use prepaid service.
It does look like Tracfone will be releasing several new mid-level Android LG phones which should appeal to more customers.
Question 3 - What is your Biggest Complaint about Tracfone?
Tracfone is a low cost cell phone carrier, and as such, they seem to skimp when it comes to certain things like customer service and quality. We see a fair number of comments on the blog with various issues and so we wanted to get a better idea about what the most common complaints about Tracfone were.Lack of Smartphone options was actually the biggest complaint, with poor customer service coming in second. You can see the top four in the chart below.
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| Biggest Tracfone Complaint |
We were pleasantly surprised by the number of 'Other' answers which mostly consisted of people responding that they didn't have any complaints about Tracfone.
The remaining 11% of our survey respondents choose Problems with Phone, Roaming Issues, Airtime Lost/Stolen or BYOP Problems as their biggest complaint.
Question 4 - Is your Tracfone Device your Primary Cell Phone?
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| Primary vs Backup Phone from Tracfone |
As it turns out, the majority of respondents use Tracfone as their primary phone. About 23% reported that they use it as a backup.
As Tracfone continues to offer newer phones we suspect more will switch to using Tracfone as their primary device. However, for those who need to make frequent calls or texts (or use data), using some kind of unlimited cell phone plan makes better economical sense.
Question 5 - What Type of Phone do you Currently Use?
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| Most Popular Type of Phone from Tracfone |
We were somewhat surprised to see that 65% of our survey respondents use a smartphone from Tracfone. This does make a lot of sense, as Android phones from Tracfone offer lots of neat features (like Android OS) and there are a lot of great deals for buying phones and minutes bundled.
An almost equal number of respondents use either a non-smartphone from Tracfone or the Tracfone BYOP program.
This concludes our breakdown of the survey results. We may may create another post with analysis of some of the other questions in the future. We want to thank everyone who participated in our survey and helped provide the responses.
We are excited to continue to work at delivering information to our readers and the survey results have already helped.
Leave a comment below with any thoughts or questions you might have and if you're new to this blog take a look around as we have a wide variety of Tracfone related information.
We also have a Facebook page with over 1800 followers that make up a helpful community.
Thanks for visiting!
. (It seems unlikely any of the Tracfone iPhones will retail for less than $400, and the iPhone 6S will be closer to $700)
