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By David Brooks, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Bridgewater Systems
Introducing the personal touch
Are the subscribers to your mobile services missing the personal touch? Are there some services they like, others they don't? How would you know? Do they find it easy to use a combination of WiFi, WiMAX, and 3G mobile networks to access those services?
Can you recognize their individual needs? What if you could?
Operators have never been as concerned about the well-being of their subscribers as they are today. The days when operators could sell a walled garden of services that were less than intuitive or compelling to their subscribers are drawing to a close. It's the personal touch that will win the day, and this change will be driven by subscribers.
This needs to be a highly sophisticated approach - designed to make the most of your existing broadband infrastructure by merchandising it in entirely new ways that match subscribers' requirements exactly. If subscribers like what they experience, they want more of it.
About the subscriber-centric world
This means placing the demands of individual subscribers at the heart of your network and application deployment strategy. Since connectivity is already commoditized, operators have begun moving up the value chain by focusing on understanding their subscribers' needs, and then deploying services that suit them.
You already own the relationship with the subscriber, and it is the information about your relationship with them that we can help you maximize and derive new value from. You can make clear decisions about how to plan, design, and target new services, make existing ones better, build new business models, and concentrate on making the experience enjoyable, productive, or whatever subscribers need it to be.
The Subscriber-Centric World encompasses the management of the entire subscriber experience from end to end, and is able at any given moment to 'flex' to adapt to a sudden change in requirements. The good news is that it also solves a number of here-and-now operator issues - crucial to their success in 2008.
Service personalization
True personalization of services is based on knowledge of what subscribers like, don't like, and what they're likely to pay for. It includes real-time service controls so that operators can dynamically manage the experience for subscribers over multiple parameters, such as momentarily boosting bandwidth to support streamed video. It ensures that whenever subscribers use a service, its performance is geared to them, and not what the networks consider adequate.
For example, by knowing that a subscriber is near a Ticketmaster selling concert tickets for an artist from whom the subscriber has previously purchased content, operators can add value.
Via Ticketmaster, the operator is able to offer an SMS alert for the nearby sales office, and a free MP3 download from the artist. It's easy, and the number of examples and level of sophistication that can be applied is almost limitless.
On-demand services
Casual users are important customers, best compared to business travelers who check into a hotel and then sign up for 24-hour network access. They may also be individuals without an existing data account who are interested in a limited or on-demand service situation based on time, date, or usage. Interestingly enough, these customers can possibly be classified as "impulse buyers" who normally would not subscribe to some services on a regular basis. These users may have an existing account, but would like to increase temporary limits or access the network in a different way.
What these users have in common is a desire to sample or access a service to which they currently have no entitlement, through either a service plan or a relationship with a service provider.
This presents an interesting opportunity for service providers to capitalize on incremental revenues by offering a range of on-demand services, with flexible metering capabilities based on limited time offers, usage, and other parameters. Being able to support these users will also become increasingly important, as more mobile operators seek to open their networks to any device and any user.
Quality of experience
Providing a great quality of experience - and improved subscriber loyalty - is essential to the success of a true Subcriber-Centric World.
Operators can look to provide greater personalization by tapping into available dynamic subscriber context information. Dynamic context describes a myriad of real-time
information that provides a snapshot of the subscriber, service usage, device, and network data. It shows the IP address and the network the subscriber is attached to; device information, such as type; subscriber information, such as location or roaming status.
It's a powerful, uniquely detailed picture of what subscribers are doing at any given moment, and can be used responsibly to serve their needs on a one-to-one basis. Once operators can refine their approach to provide the personal touch in the new Subscriber-Centric World, they can fulfill individual needs and offer the consistent quality of experience that subscribers are seeking today.
-- Tech Times Online
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