With today's technological developments, mobile operators are more frequently used only as information carriers than ever before. Usage information and intelligence has begun to move away from centralized systems to end points such as the smartphones. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are losing visibility and control of the communications and services used by its customers. Nowadays, users originate communications primarily from smartphones, tablets, internet dongles, TVs, etc., and the service logic on these devices increasingly resides in the terminal rather than in the telecommunications infrastructure of the telecom operators.
A CSP’s bottom-line can be drastically affected by the increasing collection of revenues from the usage of data services. This paradigm shift introduces new risks. A CSP’s reputation could be adversely affected by poor customer experiences with services the CSP does not directly provide (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, App stores, etc.) and may be prone to software anomalies on high-end devices like the smartphones that might indirectly impact traditional CSP services and increase churn risk.
While smart devices introduce new risks, they also create new opportunities for telecom operators to take advantage of these high-tech devices by leveraging its computational capacity. CSPs now have the opportunity to further extend their services to this ever-increasing crowd of smart devices, providing them better visibility of the quality of the services used by its customers.
Collecting end point data (from the smartphones) and then monitoring and analyzing it on a central system provides valuable insight to CSPs that helps improve customer satisfaction and experience while protecting profit, brand equity, and customer loyalty. WeDo Labs research has begun testing this approach – end data can effectively be collected and monitored, providing valuable information to address different use cases. This information, in particular, can be used to minimize the risks inherent in the usage of services, assure quality of service/experience (QoS/QoE) and mitigate revenue losses due to fraud. Measurements events can be scheduled and monitored in real-time on the smartphones and then reported to a central information system for deeper analysis.
Another interesting aspect in the smartphone arena is technology adoption. NFC, for instance, has been available for some time. Almost all of the major smartphone vendors have included it on their products. However, adoption has been scarce. In fact, I’ve used it just once for fast check-in purposes at a telecom fair in 2013 on an Android smartphone. NFC adoption might now have a big push – Apple just released its iPhone 6 and is once again thinking big with its Apple Pay service that combines NFC and Touch ID technologies to make a consumer’s life easier by turning mobile phones into payment devices. If successful, smartphones will generate huge numbers of payment transactions that need to be smoothly assured.
This ever increasing crowd requires CSP thoughtfulness. CSPs need to care about the services provided indirectly to its customers through third-parties to ensure business continuity and incoming revenues. CSPs must have a complete understanding of what is happening on these end-devices to be able to guarantee good customer experiences and protect their revenues.
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