Have had another good response to Friday’s newsletter – so I’m going to post my comments here. I take a look at the news that Vodafone and Three have both added operator channels to app stores, and make a suggestion as to how operators could be making rather better use of that opportunity for customer interaction. I will admit that some of the thoughts around a customer interaction channel were crystalised over lunch last week with Sham Careem from Momac – although I don’t mention this in the article itself. Momac, however, seems to have a few conversations going on with operators as to how they can make more of their portals, if we must call them that, bringing in different elements into an integrated customer meeting point. Let’s hope we see some progress there. I also mentioned some Amdocs survey results – I’ve got a fuller story on this going live today.
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Newsletter from 8 July, “Start talking to customers on the mobile”
Neelie Kroes, although sounding as if she was struggling with her teeth a bit, took another bite out of the mobile industry all the same this week, saying that in her view the roaming market is still not competitive enough.
Her proposal is to open up roaming so that users can have a roaming contract with a different provider to their domestic mobile provider. This isn’t solely a threat to mobile operators, of course, as mobile operators themselves could act as competitive presences against other operators in markets where they haven’t been able to have a roaming presence before.
Just to hammer the nail down, Kroes said that more stringent price caps would be introduced, to last until 2016, as a safety net for consumers. Given the caps, and the intention to increase competitive pressure in roaming, the issue was raised by one or two questioners that it may not be fair to have domestic tariffs that are in fact above roaming tariffs. This raised the theoretical, if unlikely, possibility that users could equip themselves with a roaming contract and “roam” permanently in their domestic market. Kroes had clearly thought of this too, with her answer essentially being that operators are going to have to deal with it, and if roaming tariffs turn out to be cheaper than domestic tariffs, then operators will know what to do.
In other words, roaming competition may end up also pressuring domestic tariffs down to new lows. She’s got her teeth in, and no mistake.
Despite this threat, the operators have made little protest this week, beyond a fairly bland statement from their representatives at the GSMA. They know, I think, that the game is up on the extent to which they can manipulate roaming for profit – the rest is a question of margins.
Somewhere where the game might also be up is the role that operators can play in hosting applications and content. This week, Vodafone launched a channel on Android’s Market, somewhere where Vodafone users can see Vodafone-curated applications. There seem to have been a few teething troubles – with many phones not updating to display the new channel on the Market homepage. My own phone only seems to be showing the app on every second day, for instance. There’s not a lot of content on there either that you couldn’t pretty easily access directly, or already be aware of. Three UK followed suit by launching a Three channel within Ovi Store. I haven’t seen Three’s channel.
As I pointed out, once upon a time, operators used to try and bring the app stores to the operator. Now the operators are going to the app stores to get visibility. As they do so I worry that they are losing out on a key opportunity to communicate with their customers. An operator portal, as such, doesn’t have to be involve premium-featured repackaging of content. Instead it could act as a genuine customer interaction interface, combining customer care, offers, billing interaction, and perhaps some content.
At the moment, is there a place on your handset that you can go to where you know you can see all that – a place that recognises who you are as a customer, allows you to self-provision services or make a complaint or just poke around and see what’s of interest from the operator.
That seems to me to be a natural fit for the mobile operator. From there they could offer the range of cloud-based services that I also think are a natural fit for operators, such as contacts and content back-up. An Amdocs survey released this week showed that contacts back-up comes in the top three items European consumers would be willing to pay extra for. The other two items that customers are willing to pay more for than they are already are a premium quality of service, and bundled data services across different devices.
If operators think that the app store is the best place to “find” their customers, then at least but some decent customer focussed apps in there. Offer me something relevant. I open Vodafone’s channel and it shows me a Vodafone music, two Formula 1 apps (I hate Formula 1), then four City-specific Rough Guide apps, then Shazam, Angry Birds, Qype, Poynt and other major apps that say nothing to me about Vodafone, me as a customer, etc etc
Operators sit, as we have said many times, on a host of user data and network info. They can use that to feed into a portal, channel, call it what you will, that speaks to and engages the user. I’m talking about something that goes beyond a care app. Users, Amdocs’ research suggest (and there will be more on the site on this on Monday) are willing to pay more for services that operators can already offer.
Get on the handset, don’t call it a portal, don’t think of it as a content repository, do think of it as a sales and loyalty channel.
That’s all for now,
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe
