Mobile Email
Breaking down the configuration barrier.
If you attended this year’s 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, or you simply take an interest in handset design you may have noticed an increasing number of devices coming to market with full QWERTY keyboards. Yet, these aren’t business tools, these are consumer devices. The appearance of more intuitive keypads, keyboards and other input devices is reflective of the industry’s requirement for improved usability across ever more sophisticated products and services, not least of which mobile email. Once the preserve of the road warrior, keeping connected to email is now cited as a key feature for the mobile consumer.
With no real successor found for SMS, could e-mail rise to the challenge and offer a serious alternative to the 160 character text messages? Certainly the fact that e-mail is known and understood gives it the head start that MMS never had. But forget watered-down operator controlled email services, consumers want converged access to their existing accounts, including popular and freely available POP3 services.
The potential for driving revenue from this ‘data service’ appears to be considerable. A recent report by analyst firm Visiongain suggested that if consumer e-mail can be targeted correctly and priced effectively it can outstrip SMS rapidly. Indeed it already beats SMS revenue in Japan and Korea.
Yet whilst much of the discussion on mobile e-mail has typically focussed on pricing models (pricing will always be a barrier as long as operators continue to charge for data services such as email as packet data), it’s important that the service is not allowed to fall into the same ‘set-up complexity’ and ‘reactive support’ trap that has been the undoing of so many mobile data services in the past.
Let’s not suggest that the mobile experience is as seamless as the desktop environment. There are too many product, platform and service variants for there ever (in the near future) to be a consistent experience. Anyone who has ever tried to manually configure such a service on his or her mobile device will realise that once you scratch through the marketing veneer, there is often a requirement to perform a complex set-up, retrieve ISP settings, have GPRS activated and so on. Ultimately, for many users the challenge of setting up and using a complex mobile device or service will always outweigh the potential benefits derived through its use. In the case of email, the enormous number of different device types - each with different fields and e-mail set-up procedures - multiplied by the many thousands of e-mail services available, gives rise to a daunting configuration process and a worrying customer care scenario for operators looking to support users.
By the time a user encounters a usability or technical issue such as configuration and set-up, the damage has been done. The best-case scenario is to hope the customer makes an expensive call to customer care. At worst, he’ll never use that service again. This reactive approach to support delivers a lose, lose situation. And let’s not forget that a single call to customer care to resolve a technical issue of this nature could quite possibly wipe out that subscriber’s profit for the entire month. This brings into sharp focus the need to overcome the configuration and support barrier with an out-of-thebox experience that gets it right from the moment the consumer decides he wants the service.
Figures from our own research bear testament to the fact that usability remains one of the most significant barriers to data entry for mobile users. To put the scale of the issue into context, a breakdown of 275,000 mobile data queries dealt with by WDSGlobal during a three month period in 2006 revealed that services such as email, WAP and MMS are still a problem for users, with 40% of all calls associated with the configuration of such services.
The good news is that the industry is taking steps to ensure that the user experience is as straightforward as possible; tie-ups between service providers and operators (such as 3 and Hotmail and Yahoo!) are removing much of the trickery with easy-to-complete form fields that replicate the web-experience. However, the ultimate goal for ease of deployment and ease of use, must be for subscriber self care; enabling users to open e-mail clients and access whichever e-mail service they currently use.
Unlike MMS, which some operators felt could be overcome with better pre-provisioning, mobile email demands a more tailored confuguration approach to accommodate the multitude of possible settings and configurations. Instances of web-based, self-care portals and even on-device setup wizards are removing much of the headache and helping to parse ISP / e-mail provider settings with device characteristics.
Even the service providers themselves, realising the potential impact to their brand, are getting involved. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are acutely aware of the need to manage the consumer’s experience of their products and services on the mobile platform to protect their brand. In addition, the handset manufacturers are increasingly making use of the web to offer over-the-air e-mail configuration tools.
Whichever support and configuration route the consumer takes, the success of the outcome will be reliant on religiously maintained databases and knowledge hubs collating service settings from the world’s email providers and configuration procedures for the handsets themselves. Operators need to be sure that wherever their subscribers go to retrieve the necessary settings, the outcome is positive and that the service works and is driving data traffic. Ultimately it’s the operator’s bottom line that will suffer if it doesn’t.
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