Hans Snook And The Market Researchers

Snook spotted that this was the wrong question when customers could not have any idea about the technology's capabilities, and that the right question was: 'What do people dislike about the current systems?'.

Once having found out what customers did not want in the new system, he set about adding features which the other networks did not have.

Orange was the first mobile network to offer caller ID, to allow a split between personal and business billing, to permit per second charging and to operate a free answering service;

Orange was also the first to come up with Over The Air Registration (OTAR).  What that allowed customers to do is walk into a shop, pick a phone, pay for it, and go home. Back at home they could go through the material, decide what tariff they wanted to be on, plug the phone in and charge it up. Then, whichever button they pressed, they would be automatically connected with the Orange registration centre. A cheery welcome from the registration lady would be accompanied by any advice that was needed on how to choose a tariff.

Another innovation was to automatically link a customers' incoming call on an Orange phone with their account record, so their name would show up on the screen of the person taking the call and they could greet the customer by name.

"People were amazed", says Snook, "they'd say: 'How do you know it's me?' We were the first people to do it, and it went down fantastically well because people like to be greeted by name. That came out of my hotel industry experience. (Snook previously worked for hotels in Calgary, Canada) I knew that the more often you can call a guest by their name, the happier they are."

The whole thing was a huge success. Two years after opening, in 1996, Orange went public at a valuation of £2.5 billion. Four years later, in 2000, Orange was bought by France Telecom for £30 billion.