Analyst Angle: “Show me the Cellfax” – turning mobile experience upside down!

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
For those that have been around the Wireless industry for some time, think back to the dated and present practices that operators and service companies have employed to validate the quality of the network or benchmark the quality of different networks, devices or market areas? You will quickly notice that there has not been much innovation in this space, and even today it is data collected from network statistics, probes and/or drive-testing that is used to report quality – all top down approaches.
In the days of circuit-switched voice networks, these methods may have proved adequate, but are antiquated in today’s packet-switched interactive networks, where users care about the performance of their favorite applications on their favorite devices. So this led me to thinking about what industry innovations exist for defining and comparing the quality of different networks from the end-user’s perspective? After all, just because an operators engineering manager’s bonus is based on achieving a drop-call rate of less than 1%, it does not mean that metric is correlated to the reasons why subscribers choose to churn. Furthermore, laws of diminishing returns apply and spending millions to get certain best-in-class performance metrics may not yield any appreciable business advantage to the operator.
I have seen certain operators employ the next level of sophistication in consumer analytics using CDRs (Call Data Records) and call-tracing to data-mine information about subscriber usage patterns, quality experience and handset quality ranking. The above mentioned methods do provide the next level of granularity in being able to drill down from site level data to subscriber level data, but are still a far cry from answering end user questions like:
–What attributes define overall best in class customer mobile experience?
–Which is the best device from a total customer experience perspective?
–Which network provides the best experience for applications I care about such as my Kindle solution or YouTube application?
…or answering operator and device original equipment manufacturers marketing questions like:
–What are the top 3 factors that really influence customer acquisition or churn on my network?
–What features in my device are valued, which are disliked and which can be improved?
To illustrate the value of having these questions answered accurately, a 1999 McKinsey study with Internet companies showed that an improvement in customer churn rate by 10% led to an increase in company market value by 6.7%! Furthermore, better awareness throughout the wireless ecosystem will to future products that are more consumer-centric and relevant.
A new breed of data-driven analytic companies serving the mobile experience (ME) space is emerging with smart software platforms that can indeed provide the answer to the above questions. In the next 12 months, operators, device OEMs and even subscribers should be able to avail to reports that will allow them to make informed purchasing and business decisions. Some learning can be inferred from the consumer packaged goods industry, which is served well by the likes of IRI and Neilsons who collect and data-mine purchasing information about every single consumer goods category and SKU within each category. This allows retailers to make intelligent pricing and SKU stocking decisions while allowing the CPG manufacturers to optimize their product attributes and marketing.
Given the trend that wireless networks will be proliferated with a plethora of consumer devices with wireless embedded connectivity (electronic goods, medical devices, tracking, etc.) and the need for all parties involved in the ecosystem to understand how to benchmark real customer and application experience, I predict a real opportunity for independent companies that can pioneer the right technology to capture and convert data into relevant information to empower informed decision making.
Perhaps when independent reports exist as to who’s wireless network runs for example the best PSP gaming experience, or which handset/network combination wins the best customer experience, we will be spared the trivial battles of “the most 3G coverage” or vague claims of “the most reliable network.” Coverage and basic quality are not differentiators anymore; they are expected attributes to compete. Think about what your customers really value, how your offering differentiates to address that need and compete on that advantage. I welcome the day when consumers will have the information and be empowered to say, “Show me the Cellfax” for your network, device or application!
Sanjay Ambekar is the Co-founder and Partner at NGN Consulting L.L.C. (www.nextgnconsulting.com) and can be reached at sanjay@nextgnconsulting.com.