Next Generation Services Now Telescope

Personalized Call Management
Connecting with Subscribers to Capture New Revenues

White Paper

Does Voice Still Matter?

With the slow down of world economy, service providers are signaled that they will need to find new tools and creative ways to offer new types of services leveraging existing investments in voice and messaging infrastructure. Based on industry forecasts, the number of global mobile subscribers will expand from almost 2.5 billion at the end of 2007 to 3.5 billion by 2012, with the majority of growth occurring in Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific (APAC) and Central America and Latin America (CALA) regions. While this growth remains mainly through subscriber acquisition, it is not sustainable in the long run for revenue generation. Carriers must adopt innovative service models to generate enough revenues from up-selling to existing and new users.

Still the killer mobile application, voice services are expected to reach $734 billion in 20121.

Clearly, voice services have been the killer application so far as they account for the lion's share (80%) of total revenues - a significant revenue contributor estimated to reach $734 billion in 2012. However, this growth is slowing down due to the commoditization of voice services.

For several years now, we have been hearing that the, “The share of voice revenues and average revenue per user (ARPU) are declining while the data revenues are increasing”. This trend has forced operators to consider different opportunities to increase subscriber ARPU. In fact, this is statistically true. However, the question remains whether the operators have tried their fullest potential to capture all the voice revenues. Calls that do not connect subscribers immediately due to unavailability of the called party or coverage area represent a significant potential for new revenue streams if acted upon with the right set of solutions.

1 Portio Research, 2008

Consumer Behavior and Demand

For years, voicemail and missed call alert services seemed as the basic and standard value added services for every telecommunications network. The revenue benefit derived from voicemail comes from incremental uplift in voice/text (up to 10% ARPU from subscribers who use the service), missed call notification or a ringback to the user. After basic dial tone in wireline networks or airtime in wireless networks, voicemail and missed call alert should be two of the most important services in terms of revenue and subscriber retention. However, most operators are not currently exploiting these services to their fullest potential and lack the right penetration levels to generate additional ARPU. This paper articulates how service providers can further boost their revenues by offering personalized intelligent call management solutions comprising both of these key services.

The voicemail penetration is very high (90%) in mature markets such as North America and Western Europe but very low (1% to 15%) in the rest of the world. This results in low voicemail service revenues due to the large number of non-voicemail users. In order to address this segment, operators should carefully examine their customer behavior and understand why they are not using voicemail service.

Calls that do not connect subscribers immediately due to unavailability of the called party or coverage area represent a significant potential for new revenue streams if acted upon with the right set of solutions.

Different geographies have distinct types of users. At first, it seems obvious to relate customer behavior to cultural differences and think that there is not much an operator can do. Is it really the case? The simple answer is yes, but in reality there is more to it than just simply saying that the voicemail usage is low due to cultural reasons. There may be more fundamental reasons behind low voicemail usage, including:

  • Most People think that the voice message will not reach to the called party immediately
  • People think that the receiver of the message will not listen or pay attention to it
  • Complex message deposit/retrieval practices are annoying for subscribers
  • Subscribers do not want to listen to long greeting messages
  • People think that they will get charged for listening to the voicemail due to calling party pays
  • People do not like to leave messages to complex systems. Instead, they prefer to call the person back later.

However, creating voicemail usability and habit, and combining it with missed call notification is a challenging, yet a rewarding task for operators to overcome.

The Solution – Personalized Intelligent Call Management

Like in any system, most subscribers always prefer simplicity versus complexity. To create usage habit among subscribers, operators should focus on providing a voicemail service that is initially simple and easy-to-use rather than offering advanced and complex features which are difficult to understand and adapt.
Best practices in introducing a voicemail service with “ease-of-use” components include:

  • Familiarity: Forward all incoming calls to the voicemail, missed call alert or temporary voicemail systems free of charge on different conditions: no answer, out of coverage or busy.
  • Choices: Offer friendly greetings such as “Record a message” or “Hang up for missed call alert” to called party.
  • Connect: Create instant voicemail box for all users or send direct voice message.
  • Simplicity: Eliminate long personal greetings and offer simple IVR menus, short announcements and simple personalized notifications. e.g., VM to MMS, SMS and out dial options.
  • Immediate: Fast message delivery and retrieval

These alternatives can easily be implemented to boost call revenues immediately. The key is to offer customers “ease-of-use” with simple features that will increase the voicemail service adoption, usage and hence the new call rates.

This of course does not mean that the voicemail system should not have advanced features. As Telenity, we believe that Personalized Intelligent Call Management encompassing voicemail and missed call alert type services is a very crucial component for operators and subscribers. To this end, Telenity has developed Canvas® SmartConnect™, Personalized Intelligent Call Management Suite, which helps operators create usage behavior first and then introduce advanced call management and completion features as the customer usage behavior matures.

The key to success in introducing any new service is to first appeal with basic features to create the usability habits of mass users. With voicemail, enhanced features such as increased message management options, extended notification services, parental control, call screening, time and day based call management rules etc. can be alternatively positioned later to maintain user levels, increase loyalty and service penetration.

canvas SmartConnect

Bringing Simple Service to Life – How Does It Work?

  1. A Party calls B Party
  2. In case B Party's phone is switched off or out of coverage, A Party hears the modified unavailability announcement from the MSC at no charge. The announcement would be like “The person you have called cannot be reached at the moment, please try again later or wait for 2 seconds to record your message”
  3. A Party on his first attempt
  • Slams down the call without leaving any message
  • When B Party turns on the phone, he/she gets a missed call notification with the information on who called while at the same time A Party gets notified that B party is now available
  1. A Party on his second attempt
  • Waits for 2 seconds and leaves a voice message after the beep sound
  • B Party turns on the phone and immediately gets the voicemail as a multimedia message (MMS),
    A Party again gets notified that B Party is now available.
  1. A Party calls B Party who is not carrying a multimedia MMS enabled handset:
  • Waits for 2 seconds and hears the beep sound and leaves a voicemail
  • B Party receives this voicemail message as VoiceSMS and is able to listen immediately without making any call to the voicemail system. A party also gets notified of B Party's then-availability.

As illustrated in the sample case above, these simple service scenarios of Canvas SmartConnect solution with effective call management capabilities capture all those calls that would have been lost otherwise, and help increase airtime usage and maximize voice revenues of the operators. The above use-case is fully customizable based on operators' and markets' choice while the described scenario is already proven to be very successful. The possible add-on features can be automatic connect on busy and automatic call back when available.

Revenue Potential

Through a real business case example, we will now show how much additional ARPU an operator can potentially generate from call completion services that can contribute to their overall revenues.

Operator X with $10 of ARPU has 20% uncompleted calls in the network and it generates 90% of its revenues through voice services. This operator decides to provide voicemail and missed call notification services to all users and as a result turns 10% of uncompleted calls into new airtime revenues.

When we do the calculation: 10% of 20% is equal to 2% of total calls and 2% of 90% equals to 1.8% of total revenues.

Basically Operator X can increase its revenues by 1.8%, which is $0.18 increase in ARPU of $10.

The solution enables service providers to capture additional revenues of about 1.8% of their total revenues

As more users start benefiting from voicemail system, operators will start enjoying increasing revenues. This will also bring an inevitable need for voicemail capacity expansion, which will be a key point for operators when they are making their initial system selection. Operators should utilize a low-cost, easily scalable system with a proven success for high capacity usage.

Case in Point

A leading GSM operator realized the importance of voice revenues lost due to non-voicemail users in its network is significant opportunity to improve on. The operator offered a “Simple Voicemail” service but positioned it differently. The focus was on “ease-of-use” and “immediate access” in order to increase service usage first by offering basic voicemail service to all the users for free. With this “Simple VoiceMail” service:

  • Callers leave a short voicemail message (30 to 45 seconds long knowing that the called party will get his/her message immediately)
  • Then the called party is notified via SMS to retrieve the message
  • Once the message is retrieved it is automatically deleted for good
  • Additionally, in order to increase the message retrieval rates, the operator delivers voicemail messages via MMS to the called party.

As a result of this new service introduction, the voicemail penetration rates were increased by 5 times in 8 months. The take rate was incredible but more importantly voicemail usage behavior was created among operator's users.

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