Summarising My Thoughts on Mobile World Congress

Posted: March 13th, 2012 | Author: Simo Isomaki | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

I thought I would have been able to blog more during Mobile World Congress (MWC). How wrong I was though! In retrospect, I have to say I’m not at all disappointed about it, as MWC was a great event for Comptel. Ulla Koivukoski and others can say more about that. In this blog post, I’ve tried to focus more on the product side of things, but first wanted to say something about the way we looked.

The launch of our new brand was noticed by all who have known Comptel for a long time. It was great to hear the positive feedback as well as MWC attendees’ curiosity about the new brand. When I saw our new tagline, ‘Making Data Beautiful’, being noticed by one of my favourite technology news sites, it warmed my heart. The Register even gave us a special mention in its MWC coverage (any news is good news, or would you disagree?). To me, it’s very clear how we make data beautiful, but I welcome everybody to discuss it with us—we are happy to share our story with those interested.

At MWC, we also unveiled our focus on offering Customer Engagement solutions, where our product portfolio helps realise our ‘event-analysis-action’ vision. It seemed to be well understood and led to some very interesting discussions during the event. In addition, there was a natural interest towards Comptel Social Links and our future plans with that product, which we recently acquired from Xtract.

The future of policy control and online charging and the importance of integrating them (which we already did in 2010) still had a major buzz around it. This is not where the evolution of policy control will stop though—it’s actually quite the opposite, and we’re heavily working on new capabilities in this field. Some of those ideas were recently referred to by Alan Quayle in his MWC summary.

Comptel Dynamic SIM Management and our Wataniya Kuwait project garnered a lot of attention, too. Many discussions began on how self-care personalisation is a tool and way for communications service providers (CSPs) to enable loyalty, and how catalog-driven order management is essential for such self-care to be effective and cost-efficient. This is especially important when aggregating over-the-top (OTT) and other third-party offerings into the CSPs’ own offerings.

During the same week as MWC, Comptel was awarded with an IBM Beacon Award for the Best Communications Industry Solution. I think it’s a great honour from one of our most long-term strategic partners. It was given based on our mediation product, which is being used by about 20 of the 30 largest CSPs (by subscribers) and processes 20% of the world’s usage events. This was a figure that came as a surprise to many, but we have an extensive install base with multi-billion events being processed per day.

There lies a key question for CSPs. With data processing volumes expected to grow 10-100 times with LTE, according to various reports published, how scalable is your mediation system, and more importantly, how cost-efficient is it really to scale to these volumes? We expanded on the work we did with Heavy Reading on this topic during the event.

We also demonstrated some of the most recent product advances we’ve made, and proved that we are not just talking on a conceptual level but can demonstrate how our products actually work. One of these was the new release of our catalog-driven order management solution.

MWC for me is always a lot more than just meetings with partners and customers. It’s a way to see the people behind email addresses. The event brings a lot of people together, and you get to see former colleagues in their new roles and old friends long gone, and build on those relationships, which are very important, at least to me. This relationship building is also very crucial for CSPs to do with their customers; the deeper the relationships are, the more profoundly difficult it is to let go. But like every relationship, it needs to be actively cared and nurtured. And like we say at Comptel, that is beautiful.

For some reason, after a rather exhausting event filled with long days and a lot of meetings, I felt somewhat sad to be sitting in the airplane on my way home. Not that I didn’t want to go home, but I very much enjoyed MWC this year. If you had some great experiences, why not leave a small comment here?

For those that read my previous blog post about the failing cruise control on my car, the story had a happy ending. The maintenance shop fixed the problem, and I had first-class customer service during the re-visit.

I’m starting to move my sights to Management World 2012 in Dublin, where you can also meet us and find out more about Comptel. I don’t want to spoil the event by telling you what we’re going to show there, so be patient, we always have something new cooking. Let’s ‘co’-operate and ‘co’-create better customer engagement until then!


Customer Satisfaction is Important for All Types of Mobile Users

Posted: March 18th, 2011 | Author: Olivier Suard | Filed under: Industry Insights | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

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.


Mobile World Congress, Day 3: The Next Level of Personalisation with SIMs

Posted: February 16th, 2011 | Author: Olivier Suard | Filed under: Events | Tags: , , , | 5 Comments »

This morning, I was able to catch up with my colleague, Simo Isomäki, about some of Comptel’s Mobile World Congress happenings. He has had many great discussions with customers about dynamic SIM management while in Barcelona. And interestingly, Simo found that it’s not the cost savings benefit that’s really resonating with communications service providers (CSPs), but rather the ability to improve subscriber campaign success rates through greater personalisation.

Operators can really create a dynamic customer experience, as SIM card packages no longer have to define their campaigns. Think of handsets as service kiosks, and present customers with a menu that allows them to select their own services based on their device types, whether they want pre-paid or post-paid, etc. CSPs can also further segment their subscribers and offer totally differentiated packages based on the context in which customers purchased their SIMs, like the retail store type (Tesco versus Harrods, for example) and the customer’s location at the point of first use. This even gives operators a greater revenue advantage, with customers more likely to buy services directly offered and tailored to them.

It’s great to hear about CSPs’ interest in dynamic SIM management, and discuss how this area of OSS is evolving beyond the sale of vanity numbers and support of Mobile Number Portability. This really indicates a deeper level of thinking around personalising the customer experience.


Lessons in Dynamic SIM Management from Kimi Räikkönen

Posted: August 23rd, 2010 | Author: Leila Heijola | Filed under: Around the World | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

In Finland, as part of our school traditions, every first grader gets his or her first mobile phone at the age of seven. That is when our award-winning school system begins to educate our offspring in order to meet OECD and Pisa test requirements—one factor contributing to Finland recently being named the world’s best country by Newsweek. The battle for these new mobile subscriptions is harsh, with communications service providers offering a wide range of options to parents and their kids.

This July, I received a surprising package from Kimi Räikkönen—that was exactly how it was marketed to my target group and how my daughter told it to everyone she met during the following weeks. Finnish mobile operator DNA Finland sent a prepaid SIM card to every Finnish mom (including me) who had a child that was born in 2003 and entering the first grade.

As a marketer, I had to admit that this campaign was extremely clever! A photo of the coolest guy in the universe covered a bright pink package containing not only the pre-paid SIM card but also a Kimi poster, a set of removable tattoos and a reflector—all of the things that first graders simply adore. For moms, DNA included a nice letter explaining how mobile phones are important for protecting kids and giving peace of mind to worrying parents. (In Finland, most of the kids walk or cycle to school and back on their own or with schoolmates or older siblings, and return home hours before their parents.)

After I had recovered from the amazement of Kimi sending me a package, I started to think about the pros and cons of DNA’s offer. First, I have never been a fan of pre-paid subscriptions, even if this one had feature that allowed kids to call two selected numbers, even if they run out of balance. Secondly, I was wondering what the pre-selected number was. Could I change it if I did not like the number? And what about the services? Could I modify the subscription? This might be a good option for a first grader but not so great for an older child a couple of years down the road.

These thoughts brought me back to the same issues I had tackled few months earlier when Comptel was planning the Comptel Dynamic SIM Management launch. And now I needed one–a SIM card management solution.

A month later, Kimi Räikkönen’s charisma faded. One Sunday morning, my daughter said, “Mom, let’s go to the Elisa shop and buy a phone for me!” And that is what we did. Along with a pink Nokia 7020, we purchased a Saunalahti subscription, I selected a phone number that included her date of birth and excluded a couple of unnecessary services.