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| Max Bluvand |
Max Bluvand, CEO at mobile client provisioning company, Silent Communications, explains the evolution and market opportunity offered by visual voicemail.
The mobile industry has undergone a period of accelerated and significant change in recent years, and this pace of change is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, with the recent explosion of the apps market and rise of mobile internet making for exciting times.
However, while the burgeoning app market is undeniably a good thing for companies and consumers alike, it has increased pressure to meet ever-growing consumer demand to deliver new services quickly and seamlessly.
Mobile minefield
And the mobile market is not helping itself, with the fragmentation of operating systems, devices, and networks making the timely roll out of new services a minefield, where consumers either are forced to suffer delays or reduced quality of the service.
It really shouldn’t be this hard to roll out new services. The industry is wasting valuable time battling device and network fragmentation and this is impacting the entire ecosystem.
We’re in a challenging situation, where the range of services the mobile market needs to offer is ever increasing, yet the prices are dropping, so in order to keep revenues looking healthy it’s essential that mobile companies roll out these new services and applications quickly and efficiently across an entire portfolio.
Social voicemail
One application that has recently regained favour and has the potential to help build brand loyalty and reduce customer churn, is one of the industry’s most ubiquitous, voicemail. Yet despite the fact there is customer demand for social voicemail, the industry has been slow in responding to this demand. As a result, revenues and ongoing customer loyalty are evaporating.
Visual voicemail has seen user-oriented voicemail bounce back, as evidenced by the success of the iPhone’s offering. Today’s social networking generation is well used to updating location, status and activity on the move and visual, or ‘social’, voicemail is a natural extension of that.
The case for visual voicemail is clear. With 16 to 24 year olds using their phones for almost anything apart from making calls (according to Ofcom) social voicemail presents a compelling option to help drive call usage among the younger generation.
Personalised greetings
Giving users the opportunity to personalise or temporarily change greeting messages and ensuring that any messages left are clearly highlighted in the way best suited to the user will not only drive voicemail usage and subsequent revenues, but can also encourage brand loyalty and reduce customer churn.
Rather than using this next iteration of a proven service to deepen the fragmentation divide, further frustrating users as well as service providers, there is a better way.
Network and device agnostic technologies have rapidly evolved to the point where they are now robust and scalable for use by operators and handset manufacturers alike.
These technologies allow a mobile handset provider can roll out a service across every device in its portfolio, and for an operator it means not having to tailor bespoke applications for a wide list of devices. At the same time network and VAS providers will not need to limit the number of devices they can support.
Fine tuning the route to market for apps, such as social voicemail, will help protect revenue in the face of an increased demand to offer more services at lower prices. The quicker the goods are delivered, the happier the customer is, and the sooner the money is in the bank.
Silent Communications works with mobile operators, network vendors and value added services providers to rapidly expand deployment and revenue opportunities for mobile Value Added Services. http://www.silentcom.com/