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New Messaging Demands Require Better Intelligence By Jay Seaton CMO, Airwide Solutions Last year mobile operators pulled in $70 billion in text messaging revenues worldwide, according to the Gartner (News - Alert) Group. And operators are continuing to increase their reliance on data services such as SMS, MMS and mobile IM to drive revenues. Data services, now representing nearly 20 percent of revenues, have tremendous growth and profitability potential.
But to protect their messaging profits, mobile operators need efficient, reliable messaging service delivery backed by good customer service. Facing enormous competitive pricing pressures, operators need to be able to correct messaging performance issues before they become a noticeable problem. They also need to plan for future growth, and resolve customer complaints promptly.
This preparedness can only be achieved through accurate, up-to-the-minute performance and traffic-related information culled from messaging systems. Without it, operators risk serious market share losses. If messaging performance issues go unnoticed, revenue drains away until the issue is detected and corrected.
Customer care is also compromised because subscribers won’t stand for inquiries that are either answered vaguely or not at all. And without meaningful information about messaging system functionality, operators may lose revenue by failing to provision enough capacity, or suffer over expenditure by provisioning too much.
Operators already have to deal with many millions of messages each day. Moreover, much of the increase is stemming from higher value but more complex messaging content, such as purchasing messages for downloadable ring tones. Collecting, analyzing and reporting on performance and traffic data are becoming Herculean efforts, and the expected growth is only going to exacerbate the challenges.
Operators try to use Quality of Service (QoS
 ) metrics to get a handle on data, measuring things like messages delivered and delivery times. These systems are typically developed either in-house, or highly customized via a third-party solution. But these systems don’t tell them why messages are not getting delivered, where performance problems lie, or how to fix them. It’s also costly to build or customize a good system. Producing meaningful reports requires careful interpretation of the raw data, which requires expensive technical expertise. In-house or customer solutions often suffer from costly debugging phases that continue well into deployment. Furthermore, the upkeep of homegrown systems with current data will be an ongoing cost center for the operator.
A new generation of off-the-shelf reporting solutions is addressing this problem; bringing accurate, up-to-date intelligence about the operator’s messaging systems and the subscribers’ messages flowing through it. Whichever solution an operator chooses, it should enable operators to use existing networking resources more effectively and let them plan for capacity growth more accurately. At a minimum, a next-generation messaging analysis system should provide the following minimum requirements:
While this kind of network-oriented operational reporting is critical to success, business-focused measurement will also be a key determinant in an operator’s ability to optimize their networks to meet and document quality levels and service level agreements. More comprehensive reporting and correlation of information will allow operators to more effectively target and profile subscribers for increased revenue and subscriber satisfaction.
More sophisticated subscribers are driving greater price sensitivity and an increased awareness of mobile threats, including theft, spam, spoofing and fraudulent use. These dynamics will fuel the introduction of numerous new categories of applications, including security and parental control applications. Other types of applications will also present significant new revenue opportunities for mobile operators, including advertising, mobile marketing and imaging applications.
To make messaging profitable, mobile operators need to ensure that the messaging systems deliver the best performance and functionality. Translating performance and traffic data into real-time, meaningful information to head off or troubleshoot problems has been handicapped by legacy homegrown solutions. Operators need to adopt next- generation intelligent messaging reporting systems to keep competitive and stem revenue losses.
Jay Seaton is chief marketing officer for Airwide Solutions, a company specializing in next-generation mobile messaging infrastructure and applications. |