Customer Satisfaction is Important for All Types of Mobile Users

Last week, I noticed for the first time TelecomAsia’s monthly reporting of Asia’s top 10 selling handsets. I have to confess that I have never paid close attention to handset shipments, so I was surprised by what I saw. Firstly, there are only two suppliers in the top 10: Nokia and Samsung. Secondly, most of the phones on the list are fairly basic, not smartphones. So while we often believe Apple iPhones and HTC Android phones to be ubiquitous that is not the reality on the ground.

To me, this was a reminder that we, in the industry, are often well ahead of the actual market. It is obviously a good thing in many ways, but it’s also important for us not to forget that not everyone in the world owns an iPhone or is a heavy user of mobile broadband value added services.

Consider for example how, when we talk in the industry about customer satisfaction, we often focus on mobile broadband speed and capacity. Yet for many customers, satisfaction comes from much more prosaic factors such as how easily they can get their phone working, how well they can make voice calls or send texts, and how fair and accurate they perceive charging to be.  Looking at it from an OSS perspective, this also means that, while policy control is a very exciting and fast growing area, there is also still plenty of mileage in, say, mediation, charging and provisioning.

The phone shipment statistic reminded me of a demonstration of the Comptel Dynamic SIM Management that my colleague Simo Isomäki gave me recently. He showed me how a subscriber, when they first use the phone, can follow an interactive menu to select the phone’s number, the services they want and the method of payment (pre- or post-paid) –all fairly important factors in the customer experience. He showed me this on various smartphones, but also on a very ordinary phone with a small, text-based screen. When you consider that Asia already makes up nearly 50 percent of the global market in terms of subscriptions, and continues to grow; and given the shipment statistics above, the “ordinary phone” version Comptel Dynamic SIM Management was, in retrospect, probably the most important of all!

Comptel will be exhibiting at Frost & Sullivan’s 5th Annual OSS BSS Asia Pacific Summit, 23-24 March 2011, Singapore.