T-Mobile may be a distant fourth in the wireless carrier race, but it’s scrappy. Bouncing back after its proposed acquisition by AT&T crumbled, T-Mobile is aggressively courting small business customers with a variety of services.
For starters, T-Mobile is the first of the wireless providers to start offering the Square credit card reader in its stores. The reader can be acquired for free directly from Square, but T-Mobile is helping small business customers expand their payment options and get paid faster by giving customers even easier access to it.
According to figures cited in the T-Mobile press release, consumers have a combined total 800 million credit cards between them, but 95 percent of small businesses are not equipped to accept credit card payments. For most, setting up a credit card merchant account is too complex, too costly, or both. But, accepting credit cards doesn’t get any easier than with Square.
Square is just the beginning of what T-Mobile has to offer small business customers. Some devices, like the HTC Amaze 4G and Samsung Galaxy S II, come pre-loaded with the T-Mobile 4GPro App Pack. The App Pack is a collection of crucial business tools like DropBox, Evernote, Square, TripIt, and LinkedIn. Again, most of these apps are available for free, but T-Mobile is taking the guesswork out of the equation and equipping small business customers with the right tools by default.
To top it all off, T-Mobile is rolling out a new store format for its nearly 400 retail locations to improve the wireless shopping experience. For small business customers, the new T-Mobile layout includes areas to sit down with T-Mobile consultants for a mor in-depth analysis of your wireless needs and how to meet them.