Mobile self-care platforms growing in importance

77% of the world’s population is mobile. More than three out of four people are already signed up with a mobile provider. This leaves little space for mobile operators to grow by acquiring new customers and the market is driven by price competition: The cheaper the better.

Without obvious customer satisfaction issues with low price suppliers, it’s very difficult for mobile operators to offer competing products or services at higher prices. Generally, competing on price alone leads to disloyal customers, low margins and many sleepless nights for business managers.

This being said, the Mobile Marketing Association believes that operators in developed countries could run out of profit in the next two to four years if they do not change their business models.

So, now what?

Operators in mature markets are trying to find ways of reducing costs reduce churn and open new revenue channels.

Operators in emerging markets want to improve customer care, up-sell new services and keep customers engaged.

Innovative operators are taking it one step further. For example, today O2 has more than 25% of their active customers engaging every month through My O2, their self care platform.

My O2 is a platform for O2 subscribers where they can login to check their bill, update personal details, explore special offers, browse other products/service and interact with a virtual agent. Along with enhancing an operator’s service offering, there are clear business opportunities encouraging operators to offer this type of customer care tool:

Create transparency for users on there voice and data plans
Reduce customer care costs
Increase adaptation of new services
Improve customer satisfaction by providing help anytime, anywhere
Increase revenues by enabling customers to easily reconfigure plans or purchases additional services
How do we see it?

Mere churn prevention is probably the worst option as it is passive. Operators are at a critical point and need to be proactive if they don’t want to disappear. It should be about delivering services that are satisfying, desirable and engaging. An offensive value-added services strategy that delivers a compelling customer experience, one that enables operators to boost individual loyalty and the lifetime value of their existing customer base.

Built on years of experience with 20+ operators across the globe, Golden Gekko’s ‘Self Care’ app is designed around this premise. An opt-in app that not only reduces customer care costs, increase adaptation and cross-promotes services, but also collects valuable business intelligence that helps operators deliver better products, services and support to their existing client base.

Operators can’t rely on monthly voice or data plans – the end game is customer loyalty because customer loyalty means engaged clients, added spending, more renewals, customer referrals and lower acquisition costs.

What’s New What’s Next? Mobile News And Trends

As the name suggests, there is always a lot of movement going on in the mobile space. Mobile is said to be the fastest growing market in the world. Every moment there are new technologies, phones with new abilities, apps leveraging the new features, and much more.

Let’s have a look at what we believe to be the most important trends:

- Operators and device manufacturers launch their own appstores. Despite the challenges that many operators have faced there are some great success stories. For example, LG App Advisor, a hybrid solution that recommends the most relevant local apps for each market. Or Verizon vCast appstore, which achieved similar success. This shows that there is a demand for secure and trusted appstore providers.

- Mobile Advertising is becoming serious business. Years ago, telcos forecasted billions of dollars in revenue from mobile advertising. Now we finally see some results. O2 UK leads the way in Europe with O2 Media and their recently launched operator partnership. O2 Priority Moments is the first large-scale campaign leveraging permission based, hyper local targeted marketing.

- Near Field Communication (NFC), whose initial focus was on mobile payments is now shifting towards other utilities. App builders make use of NFC to simplify check-ins, execute marketing campaigns and drive the use of loyalty cards. Which is great since it is driving customer adaptation to the technology and paves the way for new forms of employment.

- Loyalty programs are married to hyper local offers. One of the greatest differentiators for telco operators is the knowledge of profiles such as the whereabouts of their customers. This gives them the unique opportunity to combine this with personalised offers. Great examples of this include the loyalty clubs by Turkcell, O2 Priority Moments and AT&T Local Deals. Though those are already incredible services, these are still early days. Programs and content will become even more sophisticated.

- Mobile self-care is a growing business opportunity. Several service providers like telco operators already have a substantial customer base that is accessing their account information through mobile apps and sites every month. Still, hardly any of those are leveraging this opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell other services to millions of subscribers. We are now finally seeing some interesting collaborations between the customer care departments and marketing.

For more insights and details on each of these trends please contact us to set up a call or workshop.