MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — All it takes is a single phone call into the call center to wipe out the profit an operator would otherwise generate from a customer in a given month. Deeming that unacceptable, Motive, a division of Alcatel-Lucent and WDSGlobal, formed a strategic partnership to develop better, more efficient support to mobile broadband users.
The companies will jointly market and develop solutions that will leverage WDSGlobal’s knowledge of persistent trouble calls as a managed services provider for call center services, with Motive’s mobile device management solutions to better support smartphones and other sophisticated mobile broadband devices.
WDSGlobal, true to its name, has service provider clients worldwide to which it provides mobile customer and device support. From its vantage point on the front lines of customer care it has learned a few things about mobile broadband. The primary lesson to be learned is that the more sophisticated the devices get, the more costly and time-consuming supporting them becomes. And device sophistication keeps growing.
By 2012, 30 percent of mobile devices attaching to the network will be smart devices with advanced operating systems and applications such as laptops, tablets and Kindles, said Ben Geller, senior director of product marketing at Motive. And that’s a problem.
“While providers have made big investments in MDM technologies, the strategies and technologies they are deploying today will only fall short of the mark in delivering the operational and economic benefit they need to make their business run efficiently,” Geller said. “There is a vastly different spectrum of devices we see attaching to mobile networks than even 24 to 36 months ago.”
MDM BY THE NUMBERS 15 – percentage of mobile phones returned within the first 30 days |
When the typical user buys a new device or downloads a new application, they’ll fidget with it for about 20 minutes before calling for support or worse yet, abandon the application altogether, Geller said. And although Motive made its mark helping users self-configure their PCs and modems for DSL and other broadband services, the company saw what was happening with mobile devices and decided to partner with WDSGlobal.
