Telecom Lead India: Raghunatha Chary, regional vice president – Sales, APAC & India, Mach, suggests solutions for mobile operators to enhance the roaming customer experience.
Considerable focus among the mobile network operator (MNO) and vendor community alike is being placed on techniques and policies designed to enhance the end customer user experience. An extensive variety of approaches and technologies is being discussed and deployed to fulfil customer experience enhancement objectives. These relate to price transparency, service experience consistency, convenience and ease of use. These are simple, but essential requirements to enhance the overall customer experience, and also the underlying service revenue associated with happy customers.
Informa Telecoms & Media research published in 2011 provides insights into expected MNO priorities during 2012, chief of which will be finding ways to enhance the end customer user experience. In fact together with NGN/LTE network deployments, this is the major focus for MNOs in every region. In the case of roaming, specific focus is given to issues relating to pricing transparency and potential bill shock. The provision of roaming tends to yield a better profit contribution for MNOs, compared with domestic services. However, in the case of data services, while domestic consumption is expanding very positively, this is not quite the same for potentially lucrative data roaming. According to research commissioned by MACH and conducted by YouGov, the majority (58 percent) of roaming subscribers switch off their 3G data connections when travelling. Yet it is in this area of data roaming that a particular combination of factors can ensure a very positive customer experience. 76 percent of consumer users do not use their phone at all when roaming internationally – not even to send an SMS! (Source: MACH)
Among various options, three key elements can be harnessed by MNOs to enhance the roaming customer experience.
Mobile Data Roaming – the gradual adoption of mobile data roaming bundles, including pre-defined service packages, ensures price transparency issues are resolved. If a customer travels abroad and purchases a 24 hour service package providing access to social networks, or email, or a company VPN, for a set price, they know the price immediately, they understand for how long they can access the service and there are no hidden charges or bill shock when they return home.
Bill Shock Prevention – concerns about bill shock have been particularly prevalent with regards to data roaming usage. As bill shock is a significant issue relating to a negative customer experience, it makes sense to deploy mechanisms that prevent it occurring. What is required is a system to track customer data usage and apply policies if and when a customers’ data usage exceeds a particular threshold while roaming in a partner’s network. There should be various trigger actions and options, such as an alerting mechanism, a throttle or cut-off mechanism and some form of seamless continuity, once an alert has been received.
Customer Self-Care Experience – Self-service capabilities are important to help put the customer in control of their own services, as well as help to reduce MNO costs. This encompasses everything from roaming service activation, through to balance checks, advice of charge and re-charge options, as well as continued access if required to customer care agents. There are also opportunities for an MNO to engage in inter-active subscriber marketing, with real-time targeted promotions, individualized for the subscribers’ own circumstances and usage history, for which accurate and timely information about individual subscribers is vital.
The mobile user roaming experience can be transformed through the adoption of some simple approaches, including the provision of assurance associated with bill shock, so that customers can confidently use data services while they are roaming safe in the knowledge that they will definitely not be facing excessive bills once they get home. By providing tariff transparency and easy to understand service plans, roaming customers will be given more of an incentive to try data roaming services on-net, rather than using Wi-Fi to bypass perceptions about cost and price transparency.
Combining a range of service options and more transparency in the way that services are priced provides a simple approach to enhancing the customer roaming experience. However, by extending existing elements of the way that domestic data services are managed, including the application of policy rules (for quality and usage control), service aware charging (applying differentiated rating/charging based on service type) and real-time charging (real-time charging applied to post-paid services for additional usage control), then it is possible to extend a familiar home data service usage experience to a roaming data usage experience. This further assures the customer with consistency of user experience, regardless of whether they are on their home network or on a visited network.
The application of simple ideas to promote a new approach to roaming service delivery might just be the key to enhancing the roaming customer experience. As improving the user experience is important for all MNOs and MVNOs, the techniques and ideas that have been discussed deliver an optimum data usage experience for roaming customers, providing them with a broad choice of service and self-care options – all designed to enhance their usage experience and ultimately get them using more services.
Raghunatha Chary, regional vice president – Sales, APAC & India, Mach
[email protected]
