Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

hi abhatla,

Here in New Zealand, there are 2 main mobile providers, Vodaphone and Telecom (NZ),

Vodaphone is the market leader, it has most of the youth market and emphasizes that it provided tailored solutions.

BUT...telecom has better MOBLIE coverage across the country.

They recently introduced a texting cap. eg you spend NO more than $10 on texting per month. Each text costs 20cents. This provides the customers who use text lots with a great deal. If the customer uses more than 50 texts per month they will SAVE money. This has lead to people sending texts to people ACROSS the room and sending 1000’s of texts.

The down side is that some company’s bought a phone with the ten dollar texting cap and sent hundreds of thousands f texts per month. so telecom changed the deal to you get 500 texts per month. so the customer pays for the first ten dollars of texts the gets the next 500 free.

When telecom changed the deal there was a back lash because LOTS of people had changed from vodaphone to telecom to get this deal especially young people. the customer started using telecom to send the max number of texts to other telecom uses to try and get them to switch back in protest.

hope this helps

Sweetasman01

Hello, Ashish --

Earlier this year I read an article that said ... "Today, about 90 percent of all network traffic is voice and 10 percent is data transmissions. But in five years that will be nearly reversed: 70 percent will be data and 30 percent will be voice."

The full article is here:
Wireless Technologies Coming of Age

If you believe that consumer behavior in Japan is a good predictor of what will happen in markets worldwide, GAMES seem to be the next hot thing for mobile phone customers.

My own knowledge of the market tilts further over the B2B line, though. My company (BirdNest) has launched a product that turns a cell phone into a data collection tool for maintenance crews, such as the guys who make routine visits to water and wastewater plants.

The wireless service providers aren't producing this kind of tool themselves (or B2C games, for that matter), but they are forming partnerships with companies like mine because we obviously help them increase usage of their network.

Mobile workforces like salespeople and field maintenance crews have had data tools available for a long time via PDAs, rugged laptops, and other specialized devices. Trouble is, people don't like carrying multiple gadgets everywhere (especially EXPENSIVE gadgets), and the one item they WILL keep attached to themselves is usually their PHONE. The convergence of so many cool technologies, like digital imaging, into your phone is making it possible to become a truly useful tool, even though there are serious limitations imposed by the size of the display and by clumsiness of the keypad.

B2B products like BirdNest's almost always leverage the Internet as the point of data delivery. The cell phone is the input device. What is being input? Not just data that's punched in... the date/time stamp, the location (think GPS!), the view... and if you bolt on some of the newest accessories to the phone, you can even scan bar codes for inventory or swipe credit cards for payment transactions. Back in the office, someone just opens a browser window to get a rich, real-time view of information they never could have before (or not without long delays and lots of manual data gymnastics).

Isn't business fun? I hope this has been useful to you.

Shelley

I agree with Shelley that convergence is important. I carry a cell phone and Palm Pilot, and wish I had just one tool that did both functions well. Unfortunately, I am not sure this is an area that would benefit the operators that much.

Text messaging has been talked about, so I will skip on that.

Some other potential services off the top of my head:

- Ability to do people/company searches with your mobile. Perhaps make money through allowing paid advertising (similar business model to what Google is doing on the web).

- better data connections (as Shelley said). In the States, if you try to use a cell to connect to the Internet, you get very slow speeds. In Japan a few years ago, a colleage of mine was able to connect his laptop over a cell phone while riding on a train and get an internet connection that was twice as fast as I could with a land line.