Imagine, if you will, a world where Bill Shock is a thing of the past. In fact, imagine a world where the whole concept of billing has been replaced by intuitive, high-touch, real-time financial interactions between subscribers and mobile operators. It’s a world where subscribers have the latest information about their mobile account at their fingertips and can make instant decisions. And operators can fully monetise their networks through personalised, value-based products and services.
This is how it works: on the smart device, a mobile app shows granular, real-time account information. It details service and application usage right down to the application level, so subscribers can see at any given moment how their data bundle is consumed. In case you’re wondering, the secret sauce is the next generation real-time charging engine that drives the app.
Using this, subscribers can quickly see if one app is hogging all the data. Families can share data bundles and control how their credit is spent. If someone’s about to run out of credit, or doesn’t have enough data allowance left to power the service they want, a message pops up that alerts them. They can then add credit or move it from a shared plan in order to avoid Bill Shock, throttling or surprise overage charges; imagine how cool it would be to know before you start your Netflix movie that you have enough credit to stream it without being interrupted midway through by throttling. Or, that if you’re about to make an important business video call, you can pay a small premium for assured call quality. As you use the mobile app more, you find that you like to set your own alert thresholds, so that you specify when you’re alerted.
No more abstract usage concepts
As you go, anything you do is immediately reflected on-screen in a way that you understand. Gone are abstract usage concepts such as a number of megabytes equating to a certain charge at the end of the month. Now, your usage is communicated visually and you can always keep tabs on how much you have left, at any time of the day. Over time, your mobile app soonbecomes your central resource to access a variety of self-care services, offering you a wide range of account management choices and access to new services and personalized discounts or bundles.
These offers are personalised because they are custom-designed by the operator based on your historical financial preferences; spend patterns and the services that you like. If you want, you can even personalise your own discount program by specifying, for example, which hour of the day your voice calls are discounted – and changing it regularly to fit your lifestyle and ensure that busy call times are always discounted.
No more mobile bills
One day, you run out of data and have no way of adding more, but you don’t sweat it because you’re already part of a user group that allows your friends to lend you part of their allowance until the next time you choose to renew yourndata bundle. Sometimes, you lend them data in return, to make sure that you can all stay in touch.
Over time, you realise that you’ll never be surprised by another mobile bill again. In fact, it’s been so long since you last saw a paper-based mobile ‘bill,’ you’ve forgotten what it looks like. You begin to trust your operator and rely on them for special offers. Since you started understanding how much something was going to cost in advance, you decided that you don’t mind paying a little more for the things you like; having control over your spending has been the big thing missing from your mobile broadband experience all along. One always hopes that with this type of ‘thought experiment’ that the story does not end with the subscriber waking up to find it’s all been a dream. In this case, there’s a more satisfying ending: it’s all possible today, and will be coming to a device near you soon. And, it’s not just beneficial to the consumer; with the operator in such a prime position with their subscriber, they benefit from being the main conduit when apps and content are paid for and command a more powerful position in the revenue chain. They’re seen as the primary brand by the subscriber and can therefore recover the ground they initially lost to OTT content providers en-route to better monetizing their networks and services. Watch this space.
