Rogers serves more than 8.7 million customers in Canada. As all operators strive to do, Rogers was looking for ways to grow revenue, and mobile data presented the ideal opportunity. But mobile data is still a relatively new concept for many users. It presents challenges on the technology front because traditional voice customers had to come to grips with the service itself. It also created challenges on the business front primarily because of the uncertainty around usage and charging.
To grow revenue, Rogers wanted to attract more users and did so by first enticing them with the Data Day Pass and Data Week Pass, which let customers test drive mobile data, and by removing the uncertainty around charging. Rogers partnered with HP to implement the new plans using the HP Intelligent Usage Manager (IUM), a part of HP's actionable customer intelligence portfolio.
"We wanted to be more transparent to our customers," said Reade Barber, vice president of mobile and fixed Internet at Rogers Communications . "We looked at how we were billing our customers and saw a big gap between customers who are regular daily users and those customers who are infrequent users. We didn't really have a solution for the people that were not regular daily users."
Barber said the company didn't start out to build a day pass. It toyed with the idea of billing the protocol or by the hour or by application. "We had all these crazy ideas about billing...but when it got down to it we just went with a time period and an amount of megabytes."
Here is how the Data Day Pass works: If a user does not have a data plan and attempts to consume some sort of data or application, they instantly get a message with three options for temporary usage. The first is a day pass for one dollar for the day or 10 Mb, or the customer can choose a $5 weekly pass for 60 Mb or a monthly $10 plan for 100 Mb. The HP IUM system then notifies the customer in real time of they reach either limit an doffers them another plan.
The pass is good for either the time limit or the amount of data. Barber said it gives customers a good sense of how much data they might use in that period. It is a self-service model in which the customer use their own devices to respond to offer or initiate the sale. The HP solution can detect which mobile device a customer is using and recommend the appropriate data pass. It also tracks usage and allows Rogers to offer prequalified customers a free trial as further incentive.
