Focus on Quality vs. Quality
Posted on January 9th, 2012 | No Comments
In this recent article in Mobile Marketer, Globys’ director of global marketing, Lara Albert challenges mobile marketers to leave behind the strategies of mass marketing to make the most of the advantages of mobile data. Customers are ready for personalized marketing… but brands and operators aren’t quite there yet. Lara writes, “Consumer expectation for mobile is to enable new kinds of decision making, transactions and entertainment. Yet, too often we find ourselves inundated with irrelevant messages, offers and choices which fall on deaf ears. With analytics, the opportunities to monetize the richness of customer data and deliver a better, more relevant mobile experience are there for the taking.”
Where Does Your Phone Rank?
Posted on December 1st, 2011 | No Comments
Glenn Pingul, VP of Globys, wrote a fascinating blog for iMedia Connection about a recent survey taken by 3000 visitors to the London Science Museum where they were asked to rank life’s utilities versus life’s conveniences. Facebook came in a startling 5th place, ranking ahead of email or even flushing toilets! Another big surprise to me was the ranking of coffee and tea behind Facebook, email, and mobile phones. How can a person face the barrage of social networks, email, and texts without a strong cuppa?
The full list is below, and take a look at the blog for Glenn’s insightful post.
Alerts + Context = Great Customer Experience
Posted on November 9th, 2011 | No Comments
There’s been a lot of chatter this week about the new “voluntary” standards agreed to by the CTIA and FCC. In an attempt to tamp down complaints about bill shock, the industry has imposed new regulations on itself.
Why has it come to this?
Instead of the outcry of customers, why does it take government and industry organizations to spur wireless providers to take action to improve their service and avoid negative backlash? Aren’t timely, personalized alerts just the right thing to do?
Overage alerts should not be the end game. Alerts should be the beginning of a positive, ongoing conversation with the customer. Mobile devices, whether phone, smartphone or tablet, are quickly becoming critical tools for life. Wireless providers know they must rise to the occasion and become more actively attuned to customers’ individual needs. Alerts can be based on any collected data attribute, and operators have plenty — there is no shortage of customer data. There is, however, a shortage of analysis, contextualization, and application of the data. And yet this is key to remaining aware of any events that may impair—or improve—each customer’s experience.
Alex Leslie at Connected Planet argues that with the mobile providers ability to access real-time insights, bill shock is an unnecessary evil… do you agree?
Turn Daily Deals into Relevant Deals
Posted on November 2nd, 2011 | No Comments
The Seattle-area TechFlash blog recently posted an article by Lara Albert, senior director of global marketing for Globys, about the Daily Deal phenomenon and how it relates to mobile marketing. She takes the stance that better use of data would go a long way to giving the model a boost for long-term success. She applies her knowledge of global mobile operators and applies it to the future of the daily deal model. Here are a few excerpts:
“So what’s preventing this model from delivering on its promise of building long-term, loyal customers? It’s the use of data — or lack thereof. At the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle this year, Brian Mistele of Inrix nailed it on the head, “In order for it to be interesting, it has to know something about me and my preferences and be able to target me.” The majority of daily-deal offers are based on simple demographics, such as city, gender and email address. Is this really enough to target an offer that’s deemed valuable by the customer? And to determine which customers are most valuable to the small business?”
“Determining the right message for each customer is the first step. What is the optimal incentive for driving uptake? Is a “buy one, get one free” offer better than a “$20 off” discount? What offers are actually too rich and attract the wrong type of customer? How effective are certain types of messages? It’s important to determine customer sensitivity to offer messages because not all messages drive the same response. The next step is delivering that offer in the right context. What if you knew that an introductory trial offer targeted to those highly connected to social influencers who have completed a transaction in the past 72 hours drives 25 percent higher click thrus? Or that the probability of driving a sale increases by 40 percent when a ‘deal of the day’ is delivered to someone who lives near a particular retail location versus someone who is just visiting for the day?”
She closes with a focus on the new mobile market, arguing that mobile customers will opt in to those offers which are relevant to their lives, their location, and their current situation, in other words, relevant to the context. Her closing point hits the nail on the head, “By applying analytics to the rich universe of data at their fingertips, mobile operators can uncover the right time and place to deliver offers to the right customer — turning a daily deal into a relevant deal.”
Let Context Drive Your Customer Approach
Posted on October 24th, 2011 | No Comments
A post from Mark Sten, senior VP of marketing and carrier relations, Globys
Customers expect their providers to know what they need. When they experience a high number of dropped calls, for example, they expect you to proactively contact them and credit their account for the dropped calls instead of hitting them with a one-off offer for a new service.
The key is delivering relevant communications – whether that’s an informational message, overage alert, discount offer, loyalty benefit or content – by determining the right context and the right message that will drive action. With this approach, organizations can increase the degree of engagement with their customers.
By better engaging customers across their entire life cycle, operators can maximize the lifetime value of each customer – whether a consumer, small- or medium-size business, or enterprise.
Consider an operator that wants to increase data revenue by leveraging context. A subscriber has low usage over a period of two months. Upon determining that the subscriber’s data usage is limited to news and web browsing, the operator delivers an initial offer of two hours of free web surfing from 5-7 pm which is the peak news hour. Then one day after peak usage, the subscriber receives an educational message highlighting the value of data related to browsing the web, email and apps. Once a usage pattern is set, the operator sends a message to the customer showing them a breakdown of their current usage – a message that reinforces value for the customer. Three months later when the subscriber gets a new phone, an SMS is sent to the customer describing features of the new phone. The next month the customer signs up for a 5GB data plan.
Leveraging contextual insights to deliver the right communication at the right time and place not only ensures relevance, but it helps operators enhance the customer experience in a way that maximizes lifetime value.
Operators need to adopt a true, context-driven customer lifecycle management approach – thinking in terms of each customer’s entire lifecycle and uncovering the right contexts in which to engage a customer with the right communication. It’s not just about up-selling and cross-selling products. It’s about delivering the right communication in a way that positively impacts the customer experience.
Originally appeared on telecomasia.net.
Nothing but Net: Creating Loyal Mobile Customers
Posted on October 18th, 2011 | No Comments
He dribbles left, uses his patented crossover dribble, and, like a marksman, fires a 20 foot jumper that hits “nothing but net” just as the buzzer goes off. Game over. The good guys (2008 Seattle Sonics) win the NBA Championship.
This is the year of another strike-delayed NBA season (and three years removed from my beloved Sonics leaving town). It’s also a time when mobile operators have finally embraced their existing customers as the key to financial success.
Creating “net promoters” (or real loyalists) is the new buzz among mobile marketers, but in reality the chance of operators creating net promoters over night is about as likely as the NBA season starting on time (I, for one, look forward to seeing Kobe play in Italy!).
Really smart mobile marketers know that creating net promoters among their customers is a tougher task than acquiring them. They also know that if they scored their customers today, they’d probably have many more detractors than promoters.
So what do they have to do?
- Think longer term
- Measure differently
- Be customer centric
- Practice, practice, practice
The beauty of net promoter score (NPS) is its simplicity in measuring loyalty. You ask customers if they’d recommend you and if you get scores of 9+, you celebrate. If you get scores below 6, you either quickly shift your strategy or update your resume. In between, and you are in fickle territory.
The real challenge, however, lies underneath any given score, and more importantly on how you got it and most importantly, how you change it.
Going back to the basketball analogy, whether you are talking Tim Hardaway (the point guard referenced above with the killer crossover dribble), Michael Jordan, or Kobe Bryant, there is a false simplicity to their “nothing but net” jump shots. To perfect that buzzer beater shot, they took tens of thousands of shots measuring success immediately and calibrating for the next shot over and over again.
An often cited author, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success says “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
Let’s face it. Mobile operators aren’t good at creating loyalists because they’ve never had to. As long as the gross add engine was humming with richer and richer acquisition promotions, there was never a need to really understand the customer, nor what motivates true loyalty.
Times have changed.
The miracle shot called acquisition promotions has run its course. Time has run out. Wireless operators have to now do the hard work that generating net promoters entails.
For mobile operators to drive net promoters, they too will have to practice, practice and practice some more. They’ll have to put together a game plan that is both longitudinal and reaches beyond measuring campaign responses to understanding customer behavior and measuring customer attitudes.
So what’s the game plan?
1) Sync up to the goal: Companies like American Express or Nordstrom have high net promoter scores because EVERYONE is aligned around what is the right thing to do for the customer. Whether you are the Nordstrom CEO or the merchandizing manager in Brass Plum, there is no exception. For wireless operators, the customer marketing group is often like a man rowing at sea without a paddle. They are charged with taking care of the customer so everyone else can focus on driving gross adds. Good luck. What you need is goal consistency across the organization.
2) Don’t boil the ocean: Building net promoter loyalists takes time and requires baby steps. Often mobile marketers throw a plethora of darts at the challenge and create complicated campaigns with enumerable ways of measuring responses when it is attitude you want to affect. Start with simple programs that have big impact, like recharge or re-acquisition campaigns and build from there. Momentum is what you are trying to build. You want the COO to throw you that paddle, right?
3) Measure what matters: Like the movie (and book) Moneyball, be careful what you measure. The wrong measurement can send you down the wrong path. Customers leave. They don’t churn. Stop measuring success based on churn rates. Churn is a percent based on subscribers lost over total subscribers. Customers are not percentages. If a wireless operator has 50 Million subscribers and they voluntarily lose 2%, I assure you, each of those 1,000,000 losses could care less about the 999,999 others AND, said in a net promoter way, you just created 1,000,000 detractors.
4) Customer Centricity: Get closer to the customer in terms of what you measure. Measure impacts at a customer level. Measure behavior changes. Connect the measurements to understand the cause and effect of a series of actions, not just one carpet-bombing campaign. Driving net promoters as implied from point # 3 is about connecting with each customer not raising averages.
5) Try-measure-try again: Said another way, practice, practice, practice. Wireless operators have rich data that gives them an advantage over competitors but that data is only the foundation – like a 6’ 3” guard that has a 42” vertical leap. Learning through trying new campaigns, analyzing the results and applying those results to the next iteration of campaigns is akin to spending thousands of hours perfecting that jump shot.
It’s a new season for mobile operators. The winners will do more than just say they are focused on net promoter scores but will actually put together a game plan that leverages their 6’3” frame (rich data) and do the hard work (testing and analysis) it will take to succeed. As you look at how rapidly the mobile game is changing and how high levels of wireless penetration have dried up growth through acquisition, mobile operators really have no choice.
It’s nothing but net.
Originally posted by Glenn Pingul, Globys’ VP of Products & Mobile Strategies on iMediaconnection.com
Prepaid is on the Rise – Are You Rising to the Occasion?
Posted on September 13th, 2011 | No Comments
RCR Wireless Reader Forum is made up of articles from those of us on the front lines of the wireless business. This week, they featured an article by Glenn Pingul, VP of product development and mobile strategies at Globys. The article focuses on the prepaid customer, “now accounting for more than 75% of total mobile connections (according to Ovum)” and how operators can address and improve their prepaid customer’s experience.
The methods and strategies that Pingul cites are to evolve from a calendar-based touchpoint schedule to context-based communications approach. He defines what those contexts could be. Then he advises to test your messages and offers because when context is added to the mix, it’s not always the biggest offer that’s most effective, it just might be the right offer at the right time (and in the right context).
“Operators have the ability to utilize real-time customer behavior to define the unique contexts when customers are most receptive to a communication and combine it with the right message. Those who do and advance their customer lifecycle programs beyond current calendar-based approaches will be those who meet revenue goals and drive customer loyalty over the long term.”
Read the entire article here.
Careful Customer Care IS an Up-sell Strategy
Posted on September 7th, 2011 | No Comments
In a great interview on Connected Planet, Sr. director of marketing Lara Albert of Globys constructed an interesting metaphor relating to mobile provider’s customer care, “If you were teaching an infant to walk you wouldn’t set it on its feet, give it gentle push and then come back in a year’s time to see how it was getting on. That seems to be how telcos treat their customers. They put the energy in at the beginning of a contract and again just before the point of renewal. They need to get better at looking at customers over their entire lifecycle.”
Albert continues, “customers of an airline, for instance, want to be loyal. They want to be able to book a ticket and be looked after by one carrier. They know the benefits but both parties have to work at it. The same is true of any industry. Telco is no different and we need to understand that this lifecycle management piece is a key part of the competitive world we live in. But, like the baby, it is a case of learning to walk before you can run.”
Check out the article and read how writer Alex Leslie discusses the fine line between careful customer care and “bothering” your customers. With smart data analytics and good marketing messages, you can walk the line and reap the benefits of happy customers and higher ARPU.
Where do you think the line between intelligent customer care and harassment falls?
No Proactive Alerts on Voice or SMS – Why?
Posted on July 18th, 2011 | No Comments
This article from Fierce’s Mike Dano is a perfect example of where mobile operators are missing the boat on providing their customers with excellent customer service for long-term advantage. The topic is the new metered payment plans from the top tier carriers – and the fact that while they provide alerts for data – they do not provide alerts for voice minutes or SMS. Why?
Dano reported, “When I asked representatives from the Tier 1 carriers why they don’t offer pro-active usage alerts, most explained that there are a range of ways for subscribers to check their own monthly voice and text traffic.”
Wow. OK… in other words, just let the poor suckers do it themselves. Isn’t this exactly the attitude that leaves telecom service providers at the bottom of customer satisfaction lists?
As we’ve outlined in this blog in the past, this type of pro-active alert is the perfect opportunity to communicate with customers. Instead of leaving them to end up frustrated or angry with an overage, the carrier can be helpful and show the customer how data can make their lives better. This type of useful, positive communication with a customer serves to strengthen the relationship, isn’t that worth more than a few extra nickels?
As Dano concluded, “More importantly, pro-active usage alerts would show that wireless carriers are interested in actually providing fair service to their customers, rather than sneaking extra money out of their pockets.”
What do you think?
“Put it in Context” Series No. 3: Lifecycle Events
Posted on July 13th, 2011 | No Comments
So far our series on different contexts has covered usage behavior and billing events. Like billing, there are several other types of events that occur during the average customer’s lifecycle. These events – or what we consider “opportunities” – can include a dropped call, new service/new line/new device added, plan change, service anniversary, birthday, new address, trial ending, or even a competitive promotion. Each event is a chance for you to engage with your customer or at the very least, show that you appreciate their business.
“Traditionally, operators have relied on segmentation schemas and calendar-based life cycle event triggers, such as ‘third month as a subscriber’ or ‘one month before contract renewal,’ to drive customer engagement communications despite realizing the limitation of this approach,” said Glenn Pingul, vice president of products and mobile strategies of Globys. “Globys is helping operators shift their focus from running one-off campaigns that focus on product penetration or campaign lift, for example, to realizing the cumulative benefit of creating an ongoing, relevant dialogue with each customer related to billing information, usage alerts, marketing offers, pre-emptive Care messages, etc.”
With data-driven communications, the messages become personal and are tied to very real, specific events in their lives and their lifecycle as a mobile customer. Some examples might include:
- An SMS apologizing and showing a credit for a dropped call within a day of it occurring
- An email or SMS acknowledging a new service added and providing a few quick tips on how to use it
- A discount coupon via mail, email or SMS for accessories for a new device
- A warning that a trial period is ending and how they can sign up or try other services
- A Happy Birthday message with an accessory discount coupon for use in-store or on the Web
All of these messages can be automated to occur at the right time for your customers, and even to be delivered in the mode that they choose (mail, email, SMS). There are no parameters except the customer’s preferences and the operator’s services. When the operator works to protect the customer from spam and irrelevant marketing – then the customer will be more open to offers and up-sell messages from the operator.
The message on customer service for operators is not great. Many people feel that the operator is just too complex to work with. Data-driven, event-based, personalized messages should erase that concept. Focusing on one event at a time, and being proactive about it, should improve the customer experience as well as their attitude about their mobile service provider.
Try it. The impact on loyalty, longevity and spending could be great.