It’s not that developing a solution to the bill-shock problem is simple, or a no-brainer, but the decision to voluntarily move forward with one should be. There is no upside to letting it continue, no excuse for letting it happen in the first place.
There is plenty of blame to go around, plenty of explanations for the creation of a situation that pits 30 million U.S. consumers users against their service providers and sometimes winds up in court but always ends with a less-than-ideal customer experience, the opposite of the stated goals of every service provider operating today.
Consumers determined to get the latest new gadget the day it arrives in stores may not be the most reliable receptacles of detail about their pricing plan. And service providers could do more to explain the implications of using their devices as intended. But the bottom line is that the industry now has the means to solve the problem and to do it in a way that benefits both them and their customers. The solution lies somewhere between the unsustainable unlimited plans of yester-G and the unrefined volume-based pricing of the earliest CDPD (cellular digital packet data) service.
David Knox, global product marketing manager for charging at Acision, said that volume-based pricing is the answer — but with a twist. And having been through the mandated controls in the European Union, he is encouraging operators in the U.S. to get out in front of the FCC and deploy usage alerts and controls on their own. His company wrote a white paper on its European experience, which you can find here.
The twist Knox refers to is in the real-time controls afforded by sophisticated charging platforms. Acision is not alone in this as the field for real-time charging solutions grows crowded and mobile operators begin to experiment. In fact, money is beginning to flow into this space as startups such as Dave Labuda-led MATRIXX Software raised $9 million in funding in March from Greylock Partners and Tugboat Ventures. Labuda was co-founder and CEO of Portal Software.
There is a mix of newer standalone charging solutions and larger traditional BSS/OSS players with integrated solutions.
The piece that mobile operators need to get right is the alert and control features that inform and empower the customer, while turning the potential churn-inducing bill shock experience into an up-sell opportunity.
“Operators are going back to volume-based charging, but instead of having the customer figure out how much volume they are using and what it is going to cost, operators can put in real-time spending controls and notification so users can configure their own standing limits,” Knox said.
Since bill shock impacts postpay users more than prepaid, and the U.S. is primarily postpay, the situation needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Knox suggests operators go beyond the controls put in place in Europe, which primarily address only very high volume users. “The limits are so high, they only target the heavy users jamming the network,” he said. “A real-time charging solution is proactive and gives all customers more confidence in the services and establishes trust with the operator who automatically monitors their spending so the user doesn’t have to keep checking.”
Experimentation in Europe proved a couple of realities worth noting. The first is that passive messaging doesn’t work. One of the biggest causes of bill shock was users traveling between countries and using mobile data applications. So legislators began requiring operators to send a welcome message to users as they stepped off the plane in another country, explaining the rates and potential roaming charges. People took them as marketing messages and ignored them.
So they implemented $50 Euro standing limits on data that were locked in until a user requested otherwise. Acision has a rating and charging system that enables operators to define different bundles and packages and lets the user set the usage allowances.
“Getting a head start on this makes sense,” Knox said. “The last place you want to be is up against legislation and a deadline.”
