Einar Lindquist, CEO of Teligent Telecom, offers his views on the problem of incompleted calls, and how a good strategy can help network operators to maximise revenues and increase subscriber stickiness.
If the revenues from your telecoms services are represented as a jigsaw puzzle, voice still makes up the biggest part of the picture. Even though data revenues are predicted to continue growing as new services are launched, voice will be the engine room for operators’ income in the foreseeable future.
Yet most operators are simply throwing away many of the pieces in their revenue puzzle, because only a minority of voice calls are completed and paid for. Estimates of uncompleted calls vary, but most telecoms analysts agree that only just over half of all dialled calls are billable. The rest are just taking up your network capacity, and not generating cash.
Why are these calls not completed? It’s usually due to one of these three reasons:
1. The called party’s line is busy (or unavailable, if it’s a mobile)
2. The caller hangs up before the call is answered
3. The person being called chooses not to answer
So the question for operators is, how to convert this unbillable network activity into revenue-generating call minutes? The first and simplest method usually applied to increasing call completion rates is voicemail.
Although it’s proven effective in growing the number of calls completed and returned, voicemail has become surrounded by a number of myths, both in cultural and usage terms.
Voicemail myths
There are several common voicemail myths, and these often relate to a so-called cultural issue or a sweeping generalization about costs. You may have heard pronouncements such as: ”There’s no voicemail market in Asia or Africa because people don’t like talking to machines,” or ”Voicemail isn’t effective in Europe because of the costs, it’s cheaper to send an SMS.”
Yet these pieces of received wisdom don’t bear scrutiny. Teligent's data has shown that slam-down rates (i.e. calls which reach a voicemail service but do not result in a message being left) are almost identical in Africa, Asia and Scandinavia, at around 80%.
It would be hard to find three more diverse markets, both in terms of phone usage and charging, yet the closely-correlated slam-down rates in each indicate that users share a dislike of voicemail. However, I believe this dislike is mostly due to the type of service that has typically been available to users.
Redefining messaging
The key point is that a traditional, static, answering-machine service may not significantly increase call completion rates – but a more, flexible approach, in both the types of message service available, and how those services are enabled, can boost completion rates and revenues.
So how should messaging services be redefined? And how can they be deployed effectively to boost subscriber usage, call completion, and revenues? The key is to move away from basic greetings to a more detailed, personalised approach to voicemail services.
Here are the service offerings that I believe will be key to driving up completion rates.
The ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ drivers
Thanks to social networking, people are used to the idea of updating their location and activities frequently. So why not offer subscribers the ability to personalise their greetings or update temporary greeting messages regularly, to drive voicemail usage?
If your messaging platform makes it easy for subscribers to update temporary greetings to reflect what they are doing, such as: “Hello, I’m not available until 3pm today as I’m flying to Madrid. I’ll respond when I land”, then you encourage uptake of voicemail usage – which means more completed calls, more returned calls, and more revenue.
The key to enabling this is a flexible, integrated service platform, with personalisation, location-sensitive and intelligent routing capabilities. The key point is that the subscribers – the people that actually use your services – should have the ability to set up, personalise and manage these services themselves.
Missed call alerts
I mentioned slam-down rates earlier. Of course, these are all completed calls, but critically, the call recipient may not know someone was calling them. So missed call alerts are an excellent way of driving additional revenues from short duration slam-downs, as they encourage the recipient of the alert to make extra calls in response to the slam down. The alerts are usually delivered by SMS to a mobile, and of course can also be delivered to a land-line number using text-to-speech conversion.
An integrated messaging platform can process slam-downs that reached voicemail as if they were genuine missed calls, encouraging more users to switch on their voicemail, and driving call returns.
Routing matters
One of the barriers to mobile voicemail usage in Europe was the cost of roaming charges to subscribers when they received a message – meaning many users simply switched off voicemail when travelling outside their home country. Even with the EU now capping roaming charges, subscribers may still prove reluctant to switch their voicemail services back on.
So using a services platform with intelligent routing capability can ensure that a given call to a roaming subscriber’s voicemail is not done via a costly international call – reassuring subscribers that their calls will be routed as cost-effectively as possible. This will increase roaming voicemail usage, and the number of completed calls – a far better situation than uncompleted, unbillable calls hitting disabled voicemail boxes.
Doing the maths
The ROI calculation from these services is simple and compelling. Let’s assume your network has a million subscribers, and a completion rate of 50%. If by deploying call completion services (such as customisable voicemail greetings or missed call alerts), an extra 10% of your subscribers start using them, and complete two extra calls per week, per subscriber. At 10 cents for a one-minute call, the recurring monthly revenue would be 80,000 euros.
As well as increasing the amount of billable traffic on your network, the stickier that you can make your services with more flexible options, the less subscriber churn you’ll experience. If subscribers feel they are getting real added functionality and value from the service, they will also invest more time in setting up and personalising their messaging services – and will be far less likely to switch to another supplier.
Underpinning these services should be an integrated service platform that can expand according to your needs and allows rapid deployment of new services – while giving subscribers a friendly user interface that makes it easy for them to set-up and manage their personal preferences.
Why not add more pieces to your revenue puzzle, by simply turning more of your network activity into completed calls with flexible call-completion and messaging services?
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