Telecom - automated tariff optimization as the next improvement in customer relationship

Yesterday, I received two messages from my telecom provider.

The first message was an SMS notification that I reached 50% of volume granted by my data plan. I like this kind of positive message when it's not pushed to often.

The second message was a bill. It's usually not a pleasure to receive a bill but this one was a bit special. In the header, the provider announces that tariff optimization process has been run based on my consumption and the tariff plan that I have selected is still the best one for me.

It is also mentioned that they will automatically run this tariff optimization process every 6 months. The optimization facility was already available before but it was up to the subscriber to run it and to switch tariff. Now, at least the simulation is executed automatically.

Telecom operator considers that it's better to keep an existing subscriber than artificially increase the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) based on poor customer relationship. Customer loyalty improvement could make a sound difference for the value of the share at the end. I consider it as a good anti-churn tool and a very good move of telecom industry inline with respect of the subscriber. A win-win deal obviously.

What is still missing is a simulation of tariff with offers from competitors. It would have been very nice to add a sentence : "and if you would have selected provider B, you would have paid x € more every month" ... if it's true.

Is "automated cross-provider tariff comparison" the next step in customer relationship improvement ?

To be continued ...

Benoit Quirynen

France : VAT increase can turn to a free IPhone for consumers

In France, government has increased VAT rate on Internet access from 5.5% to 19.6%. Based on this increase, most of telecom operators (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) increase their price to more or less reflect the VAT increase.

However, according to this site (http://eco.rue89.com/2010/12/30/mobiles-internet-et-si-on-resiliait-tous-nos-abonnements-182755), this price increase is considered as a possible breach on contract. Consumers who contracted a package including a mobile phone with a subscription are now allowed to keep the phone, stop the contract and ... re-initiate a new contract possibly including a new phone. So the expensive I-Phone acquired a few weeks ago within the scope of a contract can become yours ... and you can get a new one, restarting a new contract.

That's where sponsoring (or bundling subscription and phones) of mobile phone for recruiting new subscribers of expensive subscriptions or membership can turn to become very expensive for operators.

In a world of expected continuous inflation during next years, telecom operators would be well inspired to better study their pricing, contracts and bundling strategy instead of applying linear changes. As consumers, we should probably be even more careful reading terms and conditions in the future.

All this clearly benefits to mobile phone manufacturers. Apple, Samsung, Nokia and the likes but also Google through Android could accelerate their sales in France beginning of this year if this trick turns to be applied by a lot of consumers.

Price increases are also announced in Belgium. Will the same apply ?

To be continued.

Benoit Quirynen

Print publishers - it's time for a Copernican revolution

Today, we see a lot of print publishers willing to leverage IPad interactive capabilities to better monetize their assets. Since paper is currently their main source of revenue, they thus study how they could extend their IT systems and processes with minimal impact to deliver interactive experience.

Experience proves that adding interactivity along the way is complex and painful, often requiring manual costly processes. For a future-safe approach, publishers should consider redesigning their whole IT, taking digital and interactive as the source and "passive paper" as one of the multiple and diverse outputs.

Some of them already started this move in to adopt to the online space. It's only the beginning. This definitely requires a "Copernican revolution" and related change management processes to move the whole company in 21st century.

Thanks to evolutions during the last decade in this domain, by both industries and open source, this investment will make it much more cost effective and seamless for introduction of new formats and extension to new devices.
Having "rock-bottom" costs for the production factory can leave the money on the long run to either attract top writers and bloggers, bringing the right audience and/or give flexibility to evolve in terms of business model.

Yesterday, moving in the new space was an opportunity. Tomorrow, keeping current methods will yield a threat.

Are "Print publishers" ready for this change ? Future will say.

To be continued

Benoit Quirynen

Digital dialog - definitely engaging

This week, I once again had to invoke my preferred customer care - the one of my telecom service provider - in order to activate a data roaming pack.

After a few hours, I received an SMS asking if I wanted to freely participate to a survey about the quality of the interaction with customer care agent. I positively answered and received 2 questions with possibility to reply by sending an SMS including 1 for yes or 2 for no. The last question was asking for open comment. My last personal comment was a proposal for service activation through SMS or web self-care, which would be much more efficient for me than dialing my well-known call center.
Funny to personally experience a format I tried to convince this industry to adopt a few months ago for different usage.

As a subscriber, I honestly found the format more interesting than audio survey usually proposed at the end of the call. It gave me some time to digest if I was happy or not and I felt it much less intrusive.

Answers were explicitly mentioned to be free. Since I answered the survey while in roaming, I'm curious to see if these messages will be charged or not on my next bill. A next test about the consistency about customer communication.

The previous test about communication consistency failed. When in roaming, I received as usual 3 messages indicating rules and caveat about usage abroad. A 4 digits phone number is mentioned in the message. I tried it and ... the answer is that I am invited to dial another 9 digits number. I actually wonder why a telecom operator can not automatically ensure the re-routing of the call to the right support center.

So, still a long way to run for full customer communication consistency but, at least, some telecom operators start to use compelling formats to communicate with their subscribers.

To be continued ...

Benoit Quirynen

Identity Portability : a small mobile portability issue in UK reminds a global email portability issue nearly everywhere

For more than a decade, regulators in Europe have forced telcos, in a sense of teasing competition, to ease transfer of mobile phone number from an operator to another one. Today, nothing exist for email portability.

In UK, new rules applied from 2011 onwards still include a statement indicating that the consumer must first ask authorization to donor operator. UK is the single country in Europe where this preliminary authorization is required.

In the scope of identity portability, mobile number certainly is a key identification mean. But email is probably today as important for residential consumers.

Some petitions about email portability in order to restrict the power of AOL have been proposed to FCC in US. Email portability has been approved by Knesset in Israel. Where does European Commission stand for email address portability ?

Perhaps European Union should also define rules in this email portability area, some persons being locked with their ISP only due to their email address. And this regulation should not be restricted to ISPs. It should also be applied for email service providers in general.

Differentiation should then be done based on the service (user experience, availability, multi-screen, easy configuration, etc...). In my humble opinion, Gmail is today far ahead in this area.

Some will argue that anyone is free to buy a domain name. But complexity of configuration severely restricts adoption by the mass. So there is still a sense to have email service provider domain names.

There are several ways to bring technical solutions to this problem with different levels of facilities. There could be a progressive approach after a transition period.

Such a regulation would not necessarily hurt ISPs and/or telecom operators. On one hand, operator email addresses (e.g. x.y@belgacom.net) are the best anti-churn weapons for ISPs when they fight with their direct competitors. On the other hand, this pushes more and more residential consumers to migrate their digital identity to an over-the-top email service provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, facebook will follow - all in US).
Fighting against each other, European ISPs are collectively loosing an important service in their global communication offering, thus leaving the floor for (mostly US) players eager to grab more and more ground space in the service plane territory.

To be continued ...

Benoit Quirynen