Mobile VAS

Customer experience more important than VAS revenues: Amdocs survey

July 23, 2011

Amdocs has released its research results as part of an APAC VAS trends survey conducted on 120 telecom executives belonging to major mobile operators across
the APAC region, in association with market research firm Coleman Parkes.

Increasing mobile penetration boosted by NGN like 3G, is not enough to sustain a business model built on subscriber markets that are expanding, but inching toward saturation at the same time. New services and innovation with new value from existing services is the only way forward in this scenario. Improving customer experience and retention are the main drivers for VAS,while new revenues are secondary.

ABI Research also shows that ARPUs have dipped, thanks to the use of multiple SIM cards. Q4 2010 saw total mobile service revenue grow to $1.4 billion, an increase quarter-on-quarter of 2.2 percent. However, ARPU for the same period dropped 2.1 percent. Low voice tariffs and highly-competitive markets with several operators offering similar rates is also contributing to market saturation.

“More and more mobile network operators are looking ‘outside the box’ for new ways to generate revenue, which include adding new interactive value-added services such as mobile TV, mobile payments, mobile wallet, airtime transfer or even free music downloads which encourage more data usage,” said an ABI Research analyst.

The survey found that 62 percent of the respondents believe that VAS is important to their company, with India and Australia leading the pack with 70 percent respondents convinced of the importance of VAS, while for Thailand and Vietnam, half the respondents were convinced. Furthermore, respondents also believe that VAS will contribute significantly to their total revenues, with India showing the greatest belief in this with a 29 percent response rate.

Interestingly, the survey revealed that revenue generation is not the top motivation for developing and delivering VAS to mobile subscribers. The main drivers for VAS according to the results showed that stickiness or customer loyalty, and improving customer experiences scored over revenue values, extending the business reach, desire for business growth and ROI.

Search, web portals, and social networking are among the most important content drivers in the APAC region, and almost all operators
here are actively pursuing mobile advertising – with Indonesia being the
highest at 91 percent, followed by India at 50 percent – with their customers
being equally willing to view ad content on the mobile. Personalisation of
content is also important.

By TelecomLead.com Team

[email protected]