Wireless Informatics Forum

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.

Unlike other technologies, mobile experiences simply don’t scale. A piece of mobile content that works on one device may not work, or be optimized, for another device even on the same carrier network, let alone a device in another country. Arguably, despite developments in form and functionality, the user experience has not evolved much in the last five years.

WDSGlobal runs specialized support centres for carriers, handset manufacturers and application / content providers around the world and this has allowed the company to analyze support trends and identify common usage barriers.

From its work with content providers, WDSGlobal has been able to compile a list of the common support issues and user experience failures that plague consumers. Interestingly, what the results demonstrate is that often it’s not just a question of technical barriers, but industry best practice to educate and guide the user to the most appropriate piece of content for their needs, device, tariff and carrier.

TOP THREE SUPPORT ISSUES

1) Can’t Find Content On The Handset: The consumer has downloaded content but is unable to locate it on the device.

2) Device Does Not Support: The consumer’s device does not support the content type.

3) Incorrect Configuration: The consumer’s handset contains incorrect data configuration settings, preventing downloads.

The findings, and recommendations for successfull mobile content delivery can be found by downloading the report here.

WIF has joined members Innopath and WDSGlobal in publishing a 16-page report to the deployment of FOTA (firmware over the air) in EMEA. 

The report is free to download HERE

‘Redefining FOTA deployment in EMEA’ argues that the business case for FOTA in the US and Japan cannot be mirrored verbatim in EMEA.

This is largely due to the difference in relationship between OEMs, operators and end-users; in the US and Japan, operators exert tighter control over their OEM suppliers and, ultimately, the supply chain to the end-user. In EMEA, networks see far greater use of independently supplied handsets, grey-market, SIM-free or churned handsets. As such it has become harder for organizations to identify and directly control the management of a handset and its performance on the network. In addition, handset subsidies and high-street price wars have increased the importance of RoI modeling; demanding organizations assess the impact of the technology – both positively and negatively on AMPU (Average Margin Per User).

Here’s an extract of the exec summary…..

It is this report’s belief that in order to gain maximum market traction, and to meet the demands of mobile organizations in EMEA, FOTA must mature and adapt to meet these very real and unique requirements. For example, the area of business process integration must now be considered a fundamental part of any FOTA deployment. The FOTA ‘sale’ has typically been a technical one, with very little commentary or consultancy provided to define best practice for integration within existing customer care channels and organizational resources. Such process issues are of great importance with organizations acutely aware that a FOTA rollout touches multiple departments (product management, testing, IT, marketing, partner management, terminal management, customer care etc). Until now, such considerations have been hugely undervalued despite
having such an enormous impact on the user experience.

When industry body OTAFF conducted its FOTA Acceleration study (2006), consideration of the user experience was one of the areas singled out for improvement. The same study also suggested that for FOTA to meet organizations’ needs, the industry must drive business model creation with compelling RoI modeling and reduced cost of ownership. Allowing organizations to lower their capex investment in FOTA through a hosted delivery model, for example, will increase accessibility and foster greater experimentation of the technology.

The market for FOTA in EMEA is on the cusp of an explosion, with organizations starting to explore
the technology’s wider business benefits and ability to both bug-patch and drive end-user revenue. This report aims to offer a description of how FOTA must be redefined to ensure cost effective deployment and integration with existing user network resources and processes.

http://www.wirelessinformaticsforum.org/_downloads/Redefining_FOTA_in_EMEA.pdf

Typically, an event such as MWC will display common themes across exhibitors and conference sessions; in the past, such ‘themes’ have included mobile TV and LBS/navigation. This year, despite some very obvious and consistent themes, the messages were almost unanimously underwritten by the potential for global recession, eroding margins, hardware commoditization and market saturation.

Geography

Where LBS reports on a person (or object’s) current position, geography is about mapping content within a geographical context that’s relevant to a user’s location. This is less about networks and more about applications and the integration of third party online data into the user experience.

Nokia’s acquisition of Navteq last year signaled a commitment from the handset manufacturer to build-out its geographical expertise through its software / apps services (and of course Ovi). Nokia Maps 2.0 (beta) was launched at the show and promises to take mapping and navigation experiences to the next level by enhancing pedestrian navigation, multimedia city guides (many of which will be commercialized) as well as user-generated content such as wikis, blogs and RSS feeds.

Also on show was Yahoo’s OneConnect application. The application, which is due for general release as part of Yahoo Go in Q3 2008, pulls together feeds from several social networking and communications channels. These include Facebook, Flickr, Bebo and LinkedIn. The app will also combine SMS and IM conversations within a single thread and deliver ‘pulse’ updates when contacts update their profiles. Details are thin on the ground, but from a geographical perspective, there seems to be the ability to receive updates from contacts within your immediate vicinity.

GPS radios are also starting to trickle down into mid-range devices (see note below on handset launches / Nokia 6620), marking a shift away from traditional ‘in-car’ navigation to mass-market, youth-driven integration of sociability, contacts and location.

OS / Platforms

Google Android is so 2007. The LiMo Foundation was present in force and Mobile Linux looks set to play an ever increasing role in the future of standardized operating systems and applications development environments. Certainly this is good news for operators and developers, but any standardized platform marginalizes the handset manufacturer’s ability to differentiate. Despite this, many are playing ball and there were plenty of ‘rogue’ demos of Linux apps running on WM6 devices and vice-versa.

LiMo refuses to be baited by the idea that through its acquisition of Trolltech, Nokia is entering the Linux market through the back-door. While some argue that the move lessons Nokia’s reliance on Symbian, the company has quite clearly expressed its desire to focus on the user experience layer and deliver services across platforms.

Monetizing content

Mobile broadband speeds, unified platforms, standardized development environments. All make a solid case for operators to start exploiting the plethora of available data services and better integrate our fixed-internet digital lives into our mobile lives. In addition, Nokia’s Ovi is not alone in illustrating the OEM shift from hardware to services and apps. However, outside of some very niche instances (and ad-revenue models) there’s still little evidence of a solid business case for paid-for content. As with the fixed internet, consumers will gravitate towards free content and as the market opens up and delivers greater application standardization there will be no shortage of smaller developers looking to exploit an almost infinite customer-base.

The Bit-Pipe

Not a year goes by without someone putting the frighteners on the industry by suggesting that they are heading in the same direction as the ISPs. This year, Vodafone’s Arun Sarin warned delegates that the battle for the consumer would be won or lost on the mobile internet battleground. The iPhone had changed peoples perceptions and operators must ‘raise their game’, he declared.

Sarin made a valid point when he reminded the audience that the operators are in a highly privileged position;

“We have a lot of info on our customers — more than internet companies do,” he said.

“We know if they are male or female, where they live and when they talk. This means that advertising can become an important source of revenue for us.”

Of course, how that actually benefits the end-user (who will drive the mobile internet market based on compelling content) was left unanswered.

Handsets

There were few major announcements amongst a handset industry seemingly obsessed with style over substance.

One of the best-received launches came from Sony Ericsson who, since a luke-warm reaction last year, served up the X1 and the Experia brand. The X1 runs on WM 6.1 and kick-starts a new sub-brand (Experia), which will sit alongside the ‘walkman’ devices.

With Sony Ericsson on board, four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. The last holdout is Nokia and it still has no plans.

Praise was offered to Samsung with the launch of the Samsung Soul, a quad-band device with 7.2Mbps HSDPA high-speed internet access, a 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus, high resolution QVGA video shooting, a 2.2-inch 320 x 240 pixel full-colour display and an expandable SD slot. Most importantly the device features an intelligent touchpad that sits between the screen and keyboard. The touchpad icons adapt depending on what you are doing on the device. For example, listen to music and it will display music player controls.

Nokia added to its mid-range ‘classic’ portfolio with the 6220. This was no show-stopper, but it’ll be the mass-market device for 2008 with a 5mp camera, GPS and HSDPA. Expect the 6220 classic to be a core component in operator low-cost contracts.

Nokia also announced the N96, which records video at 30 fps and has a TV-out connection for viewing on the big screen.

For Motorola, last year’s advertising budget may have gone (Motorola once dominated major advertising hoardings outside of the exhibition) but the company still put in a show. The troubled manufacturer made limited product announcements (W161 and W181) with a marketing push around the CrystalTalk™ technology (delivering a greater voice experience).

WIF member WDSGlobal has released a short video illustrating a typical interaction between end-user and customer care that results in a FOTA session being initiated.

Much has been written about FOTA (Firmware OTA) but typically it’s been a ‘technology’ sale and you don’t really get an understanding of how it impacts the end-user (ie: what’s the experience); so this is useful to see.

Of course, it’s just a staged representation but for those who have never seen a FOTA demo it’s a good insight. (video below)

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WIF has been invited to speak at the forthcoming Wireless Developer Forum (Monday 10 - Tuesday 11 March 200 in Cambridge, UK, and readers are offered a 33% discount to attend.

Simply visit http://www.wirelessdeveloperforum.org/index.asp?src=wif and use the voucher code: wif

I’ll be presenting on the subject of:

Why the user experience is often damaged by complexity - are the two uncomfortable bedfellows?

• The financial impact of a poor user experience and the use of technology to mitigate mistakes
• Examining the iPhone and other “hot” user interface and usability trends

There’s a great line-up over the course of the session, and topics to be addressed include:

• Open vs. Proprietary platforms - Unravelling recent developments to distinguish facts from fiction
• Analysing the revenue potential of Social Networking
• Bridging the gap between consumer spending and industry profitability, with Advertising revenue
• Data access and Service pricing and strategies - success and failures
• Commercial choices for revenue : partnerships, revenue shares, billing solutions
• Navigating the route to market - the most common failings and their solutions, business barriers, and the ideal path
• Usability for complex multimedia - mitigating mistakes, and examining “hot” user interfaces and their success
• Widgets- the business impact for operators and device manufacturers/designers
• Performance barriers for media-rich applications: graphics acceleration issues and battery-life optimisation

Wireless Developer Forum | March 10 - 11, 2008
Venue: Kaetsu Centre – New Hall Cambridge
Session: Monday, March 10:

Some research from MobileYouth suggests that young consumers simply do not trust their mobile service providers. By comparison, youth rated their handset manufacturer much more favourably.

Indeed ’lack of trust’ was cited as the primary driver for the 14-27 age group sampled in this survey churning to a different provider. Handset manufacturers, however, we routinely trusted more.

The results are unsurprising . The sample base was taken in Europe and the US. In both markets its the operators that control the supply of handsets (80% by my estimate), by the same token they have the billing relationship with the end-user and are far more visible in the ‘mobile experience’. Even if a handset fails due to a manufacturer’s hardware defect, it’s usually to the operator that the end-user looks - simply because that’s where the device was purchased from / the UI is operator branded etc.

In fact, in the event of a fault the end-user will typically not be able to correctly diagnose the problem (hardware, firmware, application, network?). Instead they’ll contact the ’service provider’ that bills them every month. This means the operator will manage the lion’s share of all customer care interactions, regardless of root cause and typically only when there’s a problem.

That’s a massive burden for the operator community to manage because it’s often in the customer care channel where trust is won or lost. In fact in the same MobileYouth survey operators that positioned customer service as a key element of their marketing strategy won out in terms of youth trust (O2 and Blyk featured well).

None of this means that operators should be cut some slack! There are still factors such as pricing, contract lock-ins etc that often convey the sense that your service provider is trying to get one over on you. Ask someone to make a data connection on their handset and I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of those wouldn’t do it…simply for fear over costs. Mobile services must be one of the few consumer services where clarity of pricing remains an issue and actively discourages users. MobileYouth suggests that operators who received the highest trust rating where those that offered clear product lines (Meteor Ireland and O2 were singled out for success here).