In light of traditional revenue and profit streams being squeezed due to intense competition, Indian service providers need to undertake innovative measures to maintain their position in the telecom ecosystem.
The tariff war has made return on new subscribers incremental. The high costs of 3G spectrum and investments in roll-outs are further putting pressure on service providers, to monetize services right and drive adoption. With nearly 95 per cent of mobile subscription being pre-paid, service providers will need to look at ?hybrid? pricing models for services to attract consumers and ensure stickiness. The need today is off speed, scalability and solutions that will enable them to differentiate their services and drive greater revenues. Real time charging solutions can help deliver these.
Globally, we are already seeing postpaid plans increasingly adding prepaid-style features like ?hybrid? plans. These offerings provide more flexibility not just for consumers and business users, but also for mobile operators and their business partners. To support hybrid plans and enable a wider range of promotions for pre-paid and post-paid customers alike, mobile operators in Central and Latin America (CALA) are upgrading their back offices with real-time charging platforms.
Unlike rigid legacy platforms, real-time charging solutions are far more capable of supporting the wide range of services enabled by 2.5G, 3G, fixed-mobile convergence and quadruple plays. An important factor in enabling new services is the ability to quickly change service offerings based on the service provider?s approach to the market and on competitor?s offerings. Service providers can react to these changes by reconfiguring their service offerings or issuing promotions, bonuses and loyalty programs. As such, it is very important to have the ability to create and modify rating plans and promotions for new and existing services without incurring long development plans or modifications to unrelated services.
In India, some operators such as Aircel, Idea, Uninor and TTSL – among others are already differentiating themselves with services that are real time and personalised such as per-second billing and per-character SMS billing and other innovative offers.
Real-time charging platforms make it easier and faster for mobile operators to develop and launch promotions and other offers that drive additional revenue, minimise churn and attract customers. Some real-world examples include:
Per-second voice billing or per-character SMS charging to differentiate against rivals whose legacy platforms can?t adapt to match these offers. Charging by the character or second also can be an effective way to target highly price-sensitive consumers.
Programs where customers earn loyalty points for using certain services that can be redeemed from the operator, such as for a new phone, or from its business partner, such as for concert tickets. This example illustrates the importance of a real-time platform as it allows customers to get points updates almost immediately rather than days or weeks later. This immediacy can encourage usage because the customer knows he or she is only a few points away and decides to use a service ? such as ringtone download ? one more time to get over the reward threshold.
Hybrid family plans where parents pay for their teenagers? postpaid voice plan, while the teens have an add-on prepaid ?bucket? that they fund themselves for services such as text messaging, ringtones and apps. This offering can be effective for targeting price-sensitive parents who otherwise wouldn?t consider providing their children with a phone.
Hybrid business plans where a company provides employees with a phone that they can take home after work for personal use. During business hours, the employer-paid postpaid plan covers calls and data services, but on evenings and weekends, usage is deducted from the employee?s prepaid plan. This type of hybrid plan can be attractive to companies that want to use mobile phones as a perk to help attract and retain employees.
To ensure large scale adoption of 3G, Indian service providers will need to build in flexible pricing for services.
The real-time charging proposition ultimately is about one thing: control. For operators, that means greater control over the types of plans and promotions they can offer.
For customers, real-time charging means more control over their wireless spending and services. In the case of parents and employers, that can mean the ability to set spending limits or restrict access to certain services, such as no text messaging during school hours.
Control also can encourage or increase usage of services, even among price-sensitive customers or those on a limited budget, because there?s less risk of being surprised by a big bill. For example, with a real-time charging platform, an operator could provide outbound and inbound roamers with alerts when they?re approaching customer-set spending thresholds.
All of these industry initiatives, along with successful real-world deployments, point to a bright future for mobile services based on real-time charging. It?s an opportunity that few operators and customers can afford to pass up.
In conclusion as the market becomes less and less differentiated on headline prices and saturated in many parts of India, it is important to build loyalty. Not only with simple rewards programs but by providing people with options to configure their services to work the way they want them to, and which will cause them effort to re-configure with a competitor.
Loyalty can also be built with companies in adjacent business areas, for example grocery or electrical stores. Ironically, allowing users to set usage limits can actually increase usage of services, particularly new services, as it gives people confidence to use the service knowing that they won?t be hit with unexpected high costs. This can be particularly useful for content and data services, not just for mobile but in the broadband/IMS business as well. Also for payments services, as these get introduced.
