NEW YORK-Wireless carriers can only imagine scaling back their costly call-flooded customer support centers and slashing the overhead that comes with them. And wireless users long to regain those wasted afternoons on hold with a receiver glued to their ears only to find they’ve reached the wrong department for customer support.
Help may be on the way. With Web-based support systems starting to hit the market, the quality of customer service is limited only by a consumer’s ability to access a carrier’s extranet. Consumers can activate wireless services and take charge of any number of support issues through the life cycle of a wireless contract. Mobile phone users can say goodbye to testy customer service operators. Carriers, meanwhile, can red-line a nasty cost center.
So-called “self-provisioning,” in which consumers tap into the Web for support, is just in its infancy among wireless carriers.
Scandinavian countries, where computer penetration is high and consumers are progressive, are taking a lead in the concept. But even in the United States-where fears of subscription and credit-card fraud threaten to delay Internet-based customer care-browser developers say they are working with carriers to develop viable systems. They promise these efforts will bear fruit by year’s end.
On several levels, analysts say, wireless carriers are better-positioned than other industries to let customers handle their own Web-based support.
Wireless service providers already identify customers by their different service and price plans. As a result, carriers are well-prepared to reward consumers who would use the Web for self-service and lift the burden of support from carrier call centers, said Zia Daniell Wigder, analyst in the bandwidth and access strategies group at research firm Jupiter Communications, New York.
Other businesses lack the specific demographic information that would enable them to identify and reward their best customers, Wigder said, citing online bookseller Amazon.com as an example.
“The Internet service providers (ISPs) offer a US$19.95 package, and the person who spends US$1,000 at Amazon.com is in no way rewarded for that spending, even though the ISP may be reaping benefits if they have a deal with Amazon.com to direct customers to their site,” she said.
Armed with thorough customer profiles, wireless carriers can avoid that pitfall. Carriers can drive up business by offering better price plans for customers who “don’t require the hand-holding” of a call center, she said.
Cutting call-center costs
Carriers have plenty of incentive to wean their customers from their call centers.
The typical call into a cellular carrier’s support center costs about US$1.50 per minute and lasts six minutes. Cellular service activation ratchets that up to 20 minutes, said Michael Lynch, executive vice president of Novazen Inc., a U.S.-based firm that supplies Internet software for electronic billing management and interactive customer care.
In contrast, self-service via the Web costs pennies per minute.
Handset self-provisioning
“One of the ways that you’ll see this happening is maybe not directly through the Internet. Carriers are starting to explore using the handset itself for self-provisioning,” said analyst David Berndt, associate director of the wireless group at Boston (U.S.) research firm The Yankee Group.
“That’s a unique advantage that wireless carriers have that other companies don’t have. They have this device that has a unique connection between themselves and the customer.”
Berndt said he expects carriers to widely deploy software developer Phone.com’s customer-service software. The Phone.com (formerly Unwired Planet) software lets wireless subscribers access, via their mobile telephones, network operators’ intranet-based telephony services, including over-the-air activation, call management, billing history and voice message management.
Another push to promote the phone as a conduit to customer care came in March when AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Motorola formed the Voice eXtensible Markup Language (VXML) Forum. The coalition is trying to drive the market for voice-enabled Internet access by promoting a standard specification for VXML, a computer language used to create phone-accessible Web content and services.
Enabling users to audibly access the Internet could ease the burden of cramming data from the Web into a tiny cellphone display. The VXML Forum expects to submit a final proposed specification for standardization to the World Wide Web Consortium later this year.
Telia Mobile in Stockholm, Sweden, uses a combination of its own systems and software, called Salvo, from Canada-based Simware to let its mobile customers check account details and subscribe to new services via the Internet.
Telia’s customers have embraced the service, which the company launched last November, said Anna Ojersjo, product manager for the carrier’s year-old Department of the Future (DOF) program.
By tapping into Telia’s extranet, the carrier’s mobile customers can view and pay their bills, redirect incoming calls to another number and turn their voice mail on and off. Or they can order additional SIM cards, update their addresses and subscribe to value-added services, such as GSM-based mobile Internet access.
“We have some very high-end services that are very much connected to the Internet. One is unified messaging for all kinds of messages like faxes, e-mail and voice mail,” Ojersjo said.
ICO’s carrier provisioning
But another customer-service systems developer, U.S.-based American Management Systems Inc. (AMS), has found that carriers are less secure about empowering consumers with sensitive customer-care skills. AMS supplies a self-provisioning system to ICO Global Communications, which provides cellular roaming services that carriers with GSM networks can offer customers traveling to the United States.
ICO uses the AMS system only to smooth out back-office call-center support functions, not for mobile phone users to tap into the system themselves.
“The concern from outside the North American community is that when you roam into America, there is exposure to fraud,” said Kyle Gerlitz, ICO’s offer manager for interstandard, explaining why the AMC system is used by only call-center operators.
But proponents of putting customer care in the end users’ hands said carriers need to take a page from others who have taken the e-commerce plunge.
“When you look at the companies that are helping people set up Internet commerce and Web pages that interface with their customers’ electronically, they continue to comment that there hasn’t been this expected surge of credit card fraud,” said Berndt of The Yankee Group. “If there were reality in it, companies like Amazon.com would not be doing as well as they are.”
