Wireless Informatics Blog

WIF member InnoPath is hosting a free webinar next week (13th May 2008), exploring the effectivenes of Mobile Device Management (MDM) technologies in reducing customer care costs and increasing end-user satisfaction and loyalty.

InnoPath will be joined in the presentations by fellow WIF member WDSGlobal and noted industry analyst Stephen Drake from IDC. The event is free to join; just click on the YES! button below. You can also download IDC’s latest Customer Care research paper.

13 May 2008 8:00 AM PDT 4:00 PM GMT

WDSGlobal and InnoPath recently published an industry guide to FOTA and MDM deployment in Europe. You can read about it, and download a free copy, here:

Here’s some more event information:

Customer Care, while a significant expense, is also an opportunity for differentiation and strategic advantage in an increasingly commoditized market. As phones become more complex, the challenges of providing cost effective customer care will increase. With the right tools, it is possible to reduce customer care costs and also deliver a better subscriber experience.

Learn how mobile device management addresses the following customer care issues:

• Phones ship with bugs: firmware updates over the air can fix those bugs and help eliminate recalls and support calls

• Initial setup is hard for many consumers: configuration management reduces the time it takes CSRs to help subscribers set up a new phone

• New services can be frustrating and hard to set up: Mobile Device Management (MDM) can help reduce subscriber frustration and increase update of new services

Noted industry analyst Stephen Drake from IDC will discuss the findings presented in the recently published ‘Recognizing the Optimization of a Mobile Operator’s Customer Care Organization Through the Deployment of Mobile Device Management.’ The paper identifies major areas of pain within the operator including stress due to the growing number of smartphone users, increased learning curves for the CSR due to complexity, and support problems due to multisiloed organizations. It then goes on to describe how an MDM strategy can eliminate these pain points.

Tim Deluca-Smith with WDSGlobal and the Wireless Informatics Forum will share insight and observations gained from the years of experience WDSGlobal has providing customer care services for the wireless industry. Tim will also discuss hosted FOTA services and how the hosted service delivery model can open the door to FOTA for smaller operators.

David Ginsburg from InnoPath will quantify these pain points and describe the ROI of an MDM strategy. The analysis will be based on actual operator findings. The discussion will also touch on the next step in MDM-enabled customer care – the deployment of care portals for front line CSRs and subscribers, as well as how the evolution of the MDM market and the OMA-DM standards will enable forward-looking operators to implement MDM in support of customer care.

Who should attend:

• Mobile operator executives

• Mobile operator customer care, marketing, and product management personnel

• Analysts, reporters and others with an interest in customer care and mobile device management

I was fortunate enough this week to attend The Focus Group’s Customer Experience Forum  2008 in London. With speakers ranging from local authorities and retailers to mobile operators it soon became clear that there’s no magic formula or prescribed combination of marketing, customer care or business process re-engineering that can deliver out-of-the-box user experiences that delight end-users and turn them all into brand advocates overnight.

Differentiating services on controllable, physical expectations, such as price, availability and speed of delivery, is no longer enough; indeed it’s far from a sustainable model. Instead companies must also look at their end-users’ emotional expectations and align themselves and their user experience strategies accordingly. Emotions, after all, effect and govern many of our daily behaviors, including whom we care to interact with and whom we choose to ignore.

Promisingly the importance of user experience as a differentiator is making it to the boardroom. Too often, however, companies are building their user experience strategies ‘inside-out’, a concept described at the event by user experience expert Colin Shaw.

Companies, Shaw suggests, try and shoehorn their user experience strategies into existing operations rather than building them outside-in and first understanding what the customer actually wants and needs, what motivates them and what emotions are at play.

It all begs the question; do companies even know what their customers expect? Do they know what they want to deliver and can they articulate it? Also speaking was Tina Ruddy, customer experience manager at Telefonica O2; “The mobile telecommunications industry has a bad history for customer care. Every operator talks about customer experiences but customers are still dissatisfied.”

Listening to Tina explain that mobile brands have become interchangeable suggests that too many in the industry continue to differentiate solely on product, price and perceived quality.

It’s an understanding that led O2 to invest millions in building a customer-centric strategy, something that has helped them attain the number-one spot in the UK market (by subscriber numbers). Since launching the strategy, more than 2000 new customer-facing roles have been created, a fourth call center opened and propositions are now built based on actual customer feedback.

Describing the land grab mentality that many operators had when building market share, Ruddy admitted that the industry was notorious for treating new customers more favorably than existing ones. “New customers got all the best deals. Now, O2’s fair-deal ethos has eradicated this; we’ve completely changed our retention offers and loyalty is rewarded.”

Ultimately, a large number of user experience failings can be attributed to the mismatch between end-user expectations, what the brand promotes and what, ultimately, is delivered. As long is it lives up to expectations, a low-cost car can deliver as good an experience as a Mercedes. In the Mercedes your expectations are met by comfort, performance and exclusivity. In the low-cost car you’ll feel pleased at saving money that can be spent on something else. Different expectations, different experiences, but both delivered equally well.

Understanding these intricacies and stimulating emotions has become a key area of focus in the battle for user experience best practice. Is it alchemy? Not quite, but a successful user experience strategy requires a careful blend of insight, understanding and analysis of current end-user interactions. After all, end-users make decisions on seemingly insignificant factors, often subconsciously, based on instinctive emotional reactions.

Summing it up perfectly was Shaw, recounting his experiences across the banking industry.

“Banks want me to trust them, but they chain their pens down! What does that say about trust?”

The devil, it seems, is very much in the detail.

Each time I visit Dubai I am reminded of just what a unique mobile market place it actually is. But this uniqueness isn’t driven by the availability of services or technologies, but instead by the physical make-up of the population.

The Emirate is home to over 1.5 million residents, only 17% of which are UAE nationals. The rest, attracted by the region’s commercial boom, comprise Asian communities and those from Europe and the US. Amongst these demographics, there are huge variances in salaries and living conditions; but one thing connects them all - a love of mobile phones.

The region has the highest rate of handset churn anywhere in the world. It’s not uncommon for handsets to be churned every 3-4 months or to see someone with a different handset for every occasion. Is this simply a symptom of tax-free lifestyles and high-living? Not at all…

Uniquely, this affection can be attrubuted to two opposite ends of Maslow’ s Hierachy of Needs.

For those familiar with the psychologist’s theory into personaity and motivation; communication now falls into ‘deficiency needs’ - something we feel anxious about if not meet. For such a large (+80%) ex-patriate community, the need to communicate with friends and family back home has been amplified. Mobile communications is not just a tool for organizing local social lives, it’s a link to home that sits comfortabley and reassuringly in their pockets. (In fact, local operators are successfully tapping into this desire with some truly innovative data services that allow residents to wire money ‘back-home’ through remitance services.)use

At the other end of the spectrum are the ‘growth needs’ - in particular, esteem and self-actualization. The mobile handset is a great social leveller and a means by which people build their confidence and command respect. Not everyone can buy themselves a supercar or a gold Rolex, but handsets are within their reach, they cut through social status and make the owner feel accepted and part of the norm.

When I told my taxi driver that I was in the mobile industry he excitedly showed me his handset, it put mine to shame.

“What do you have?” he asked.

I lied, I was too ashamed to reveal my trusty Nokia 6300. A need to belong and feel accepted is a powerful motivator indeed.

Yesterday I spoke at the second annual Wireless Developer Forum, held in Cambridge, UK. Some great presentations - from mobile advertising to battery life optimization - from a varied range of companies.

WIF was invited to speak about the user experience, more specifically how it’s often damaged by the inherent complexity of our industry. One of the main themes of the session was to explain how small failings in the mobile value-chain can often have dramatic consequences later in the chain. Those individual component parts therefore need to appreciate the impact that others (often outside of their direct control) can often have on their product ‘down-stream’.

When people talk about the mobile user experience they typically gravitate towards the ‘local’ experience. This is the interaction between the user and device; the UI, navigation, embedded services etc. However, we need to appreciate that external forces can have a major impact; network performance, retail, pricing and even after-sale support. Only when you combine these two factors can you fully appreciate user experiences and how to build profitable patterns of user behavior.

For example, it’s impossible to guarantee consistency even across two seemingly identical devices on the same network. The simple matter of contract type, for example, will have a huge bearing on how that device performs on the network and the content that a user is able to access.

Much of the fragmentation comes from shifting relationships between different elements of the ecosystem, often the oem and the operator. For example, consumers are frequently exposed to huge amounts of oem advertising; they purchase in good faith based on promises of functionality (IM, email, for example) and then face a process of jumping through hoops to get access. Firmware lockdowns by operators, limitations of contract plans, APN restrictions, configuration etc; all represent that final mile in the user experience.

This is the very reason why I tell people that the iPhone can’t be used as a benchmark for user experience. The controlled distribution model that it enjoys makes it unfair to compare the experience to any other mobile product and service currently available.

You can download the presentation I delivered here.