Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	The State of Standards

Bills Out, Revenue In:
BIMS 2008

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required previously, but that shortened time frame is still one month. For smaller, more nimble operators like Kajeet and CSL, that can mean a new plan launched overnight, proving that small equals nimble, at least for now.

Show Me the Money!

How to get and keep customers and how to get customers to spend more money was another area of focus at the conference. An interesting new twist is being taken by new Sprint subsidiary Boost, a pre-paid only, "youth lifestyle" MVNO.

Gautam Shah of Boost, Sprint's wholly owned subsidiary, suggested that the US mobile market is evolving rapidly with a trend towards prepaid schemes. Analysis by the Boost team suggests that the traditional price/value equation is not enough to maintain loyalty and that data services are not a compelling differentiator.

Enter Boost Mobile's "Advanced Loyalty Management" approach provides users with relevant rewards based on service usage, in order to stimulate target usage. Rewards are provided as the customer is actually using the service or in a "contextually correct time" thereafter.

Rewards are aimed at customers before they reach the "danger zone" when churn is highly likely. By providing rewards earlier in the customer life-cycle, customers are encouraged to keep using the service and never enter the "danger zone."

A challenge faced by pre-paid service providers is their lack of detailed knowledge of their customers. The Boost Advanced approach circumvents this shortcoming by using pure calling and usage information linked to the customer's number, with no reliance on assumptions about age/culture/ethnic preferences. The success of each reward initiative is measured and used to optimize the program for re-launch.

Advanced loyalty management is accompanied by new approach to market segmentation. Traditional segmentation is replaced by "Super Segmentation" based on social communities, and business growth is fueled by members of these communities who act as "net promoters" and "viral hubs" spreading word of the Boost service through web presence and social networks.

The end result is a continuing perception by each customer of a "for me" customer experience reinforced by timely and relevant

When anomalies are found, don't just report on them - go around and fix the problem.

rewards. The effort of data collection and analysis is justified by the relative cost of win-back by this method, which is around 30% to 50% of the cost of acquiring a new customer.

A Tale of Two
(Very Different) Approaches

The dialogue about changing business models continued with differing views presented by Charmaine Oak of Orange UK and Henk Ensing of the Netherlands' TNO (a government-initiated research and consulting group, with the telecoms team coming from the R&D group at KPN).

First, Charmaine Oak of Orange UK gave a comprehensive account of the new services that billing systems will have to support: content, social networking, user-generated content, location-based services, near-field communication services, payment services and more. For each of these services, we need to allow for conventional subscription and usage charges, perhaps ad-supported or third-party sponsored or all-you-can eat packages. Combine all of these in various segment-targeted bundles, add the need for identity and authentication, and her message was that you end up with a big, complicated challenge. By all accounts of the vendors, this clearly is a challenge that the operators must be gearing up to meet.

This need is predicated on a view of the future that could fairly be described as the mainstream network operator's perspective: a future in which the carrier is still at the centre

of the customers' universe, and in which all content and services are provided by the operator itself, or by the operator's partners. This could also be described as Wishful Thinking...

Henk Ensing of the Netherland's TNO (a government-initiated research and consulting group) provided a somewhat different perspective. Henk summarised the evolution of billing approaches: from network-centred to services-centred, and (soon) to customer-centred in which multiple parties cooperate in the delivery of a rich variety of on-line products. Henk envisages a future in which all charging (he avoids the word "billing") is dynamic. Charging options are limited to "pay now" or "charge my pre-paid account." There's no room for traditional

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