Market surge brings new challenges | Bangkok Post: tech

SMART PHONES

SINGAPORE : The surge of smart phone devices and growth of data service business is driving mobile operators to increase the visibility of the user experience and reduce churn while minimising capital expense costs.

Ian Clarke, Global Director of Telecoms at Compuware, said mobile data services is a growing opportunity for telecom operators, despite being in its early stages, as seen from data revenue accounting for 15 to 30 percent of the global total, and data traffic growing 40 times more than expected.

According to research by the Yankee group, as the smart phone market continues to heat up, it is expected that more service providers will launch flat-rate data service plans which will drive data network traffic growth. This is forecast to increase by 29 times between 2009 and 2015.

It is also predicted that the proportion of data network traffic coming from smart phone devices will increase from 18.5 percent in 2009 to 56 percent by 2015.

However, this also increases challenges for mobile operators to control customers' data experience and service quality due to the variety of new devices accessing the network and it now takes 4 times longer to connect to the mobile operator call centre, compare with voice service or other problems.

"Most of the problems relate to incorrect setup of the device, but users will potentially blame the device or the operator," said Clarke.

Recently, the company introduced Compuware Vantage for Mobile, the first integrated solution to provide a real-time view of a customer's mobile data services experience by starting with a subscriber's experiences and linking back to key business functions.

Mobile operators can get real time individual user experience, which helps to solve customer problems faster, improve service quality, increase subscriber retention, and boost average revenue per unit (ARPU) through identified customer usage patterns in applications.

"There is no doubt that within 5 to 10 years, data/IP networks will take over voice traffic," added Clarke.

"Not having real-time visibility into a subscriber's experience of mobile data services creates an unsustainable combination of decreasing profit and escalating subscriber churn.

"With the popularity of mobile applications on new bandwidth-hungry devices, the customer data experience has to be flawless.

"This business-wide issue impacts a broad range of departments, ranging from sales and marketing to call centres and network operations, and must be addressed if operators are to reduce retention risks and increase profitability."

For example, customers using Compuware software in other regions found that the service operator could solve problems in the first call in 70 percent of cases, an increase from the prior average of 30 percent. This means a call centre operative can be more efficient, thus reducing headcount costs.

In next six to 12 months, the company will focus primarily on Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, China and India's 3G services.

The company expects that customers will experience some within six months of implementing the software and gain full return on investment within a year.