I’ve always preached the opposite to the title of this post because I’m normally discussing communication with customers and I will never stop believing that surprises are normally bad.

The right kind of surprises are very welcome however and mobile operators are notoriously bad at not giving those. Imagine my surprise then when I got the text below yesterday.

Costwise, bearing in mind Vodafone own networks in most EU countries this will have minimal impact. Revenuewise, people are too scared to use data abroad anyway and so the majority of customers don’t use it. Financially it’s therefore going to have minor impact either way. From a customer loyalty perspective however, this is huge. Customers will renew contracts because of this and customers will leave other operators for this scheme too.

Vodafone I’m personally very grateful for this promotion. However in a corporate sense I also think you are very smart and I bet the others follow.