Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That won’t work. You’re competing with plastic cards that arrive in the mail. You have to make the process effortless.

(The only mobile vendor who could possibly get customers to do anything like that is Apple—and Apple is successful precisely because it never requires customers to do things like that.)

It’s not as if most mobile users have a strong customer relationship with those mobile stores. If that were the case, Walmart and Target and Best Buy and Kmart and a whole slew of other big chains wouldn’t be in the business of selling mobile phones. But retailers are where the customer relationship is. That’s also a group that Isis really needs if it ever wants to expand—a group that Isis should be doing its darnedest to cozy up to.

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile? That’s just a billing relationship.

Isis has changed its plans before (remember when this rollout was supposed to happen last summer?), so maybe it’s not too late for the consortium to make this rollout work. Sure, Mr. Mobile Operator, you can still let customers go to your store if they prefer that.

But if you want to make customers and retailers happy, start calling the big chains that sell a lot of phones in Salt Lake City and Austin. Cut a deal with Walmart and Target and others to hold Isis In-Store Upgrade Days. They can be staffed by visiting mobile-operator upgrade techs. Customers can bring in their phones for new SIMs and OS upgrades, the chains can sell new phones to customers who want that, and Isis will get more publicity (and users) than it ever would just through the mobile company stores.

Of course, it does mean the chains, not the mobile operators, will get the sale for every customer who upgrades to a better NFC-equipped phone. And it will help cement the relationship between the chains and their mobile-phone customers, making it even more likely that customers will visit the chain, not the phone store, when they need new equipment.

But if Isis and its telco members can’t figure out that acquiring a happy mobile-wallet customer is worth more than the lost phone-sale opportunity—and that without happy, cooperative retailers there is no mobile payments business—then maybe the telcos should really focus on something they can do well.

If we figure out what that is, we’ll let you know.