Next Generation Services Now Telescope

A Way to Monetize Unanswered Calls without Voicemail

Akif Arsoy, VP Marketing and Product Management, Telenity


“The move from basic voice to enhanced services relevant and of value to subscribers will enable African mobile operators to diversify and strengthen their revenue streams. Location-based Services (LBS) that reach beyond smart phones may show the way.”

Akif Arsoy
VP Marketing and Product Management

Based on industry forecasts, the number of global mobile subscribers will expand from almost 5 billion in June 2010 to 6 billion by first half of 20121 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.

Clearly, voice services have been the dominant 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 20122. 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.

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 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. Service providers can further boost their revenues by offering call completion 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. In order to address this non-voicemail user segment, operators should carefully examine their customer behavior and understand why they are not using voicemail service.

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. In reality there is more to it than just cultural reasons. There may be more fundamental reasons behind low voicemail usage, including:

  • Most people think that
    • the voice message will not reach the called party immediately
    • the receiver of the message will not listen or pay attention to it
    • they will get charged for listening to the voicemail due to calling party pays
  • Complex message deposit/retrieval practices are annoying for subscribers
  • Subscribers do not want to listen to long greeting messages
  • System is complex and prefer to call the person back later rather than leaving a message

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 – Call Completion

Let us start by underlining the obvious: Completing an unanswered call is the only way to monetize it. This must be done with the consent and in relation to the original intent of the caller. In the context of this paper, Party A is trying to reach a message to Party B. Such calls dominate the vast opportunity of unanswered calls. Thus, to monetize this opportunity, we use the voice mail concept in a different way and bypass cultural issues against voice mail.

Enter a call completion suite that does the following: on an unanswered call, the system creates a temporary mail box on the fly, plays a very short announcement to get the consent of the caller, and presents the caller with an option to deposit a message that is later pushed out to the called party via different methods.

This is not your typical voice mail system for the following reasons: Mailbox creation is not provisioned for the entire network and is only generated on-the-fly yielding much better economics for the solution; there is no mailbox owner, thus no provisioning and thus no cultural barriers of behavior. Having a solution that does not call the called party to action is a subtle step in going around cultural barriers to voice mail.

The naysayers might suggest that this is still voice mail. The ultimate jury, callers, agree at 95% as that is the proportion of callers that hangup during announcement. The material point is that 5% of the calling parties choose to work with this solution. That is 5% of the entire base of unanswered calls are now monetized with a solution.

Case in Point

A Middle Eastern GSM Operator realized the importance of voice revenues lost due to non-voicemail users in its network is a significant opportunity to improve on. The operator offered a call completion service focusing on “ease-of-use” and “immediate access” in order to increase usage first by offering basic voicemail service to all the users for free. With this call completion service:

  • Callers leave a short voicemail message (20 to 25 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 and out-dial to the called party.

With  $4 of ARPU and 30% uncompleted calls in its network, the operator generated 90% of its revenues through voice services. When voicemail and missed call notification services  were offered to all users ,  5% of uncompleted calls were turned into new airtime revenues.

When we do the calculation: 5% of 30% makes 1.5% of total calls and 1.5% of 90% makes 1.35% of total revenues. Basically the GSM Operator  increased its ARPU by $0.05.

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.

As more users start benefiting from voicemail system, the 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.

1 Wireless Intelligence, 2010
2 Portio Research, 2009

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