Playing the numbers game

Consumers are once again getting confused – this time with the burgeoning number of, well, numbers, with an Ofcom study showing that many people don’t understand the call rates associated with 03, 08 and 09 numbers and turning away from using them – often not making important calls – because they fear massive call charges.

This is all very reminiscent of 20 years ago when premium rate numbers ended up all over the papers because of massive bills ‘inadvertently’ racked up by ‘unsuspecting’ callers. But is this really the case?

Alright, adult and other proper premium services have always relied on high call rates for their premium products But, for a while, back in the 1990s, many businesses adopted freefone numbers for customer contact as they were getting so many calls. These days, however, a growing amount of contact with businesses is through IM, email, skype, text and even social media channels. As a result, businesses have started to use premium or local numbers again for call centres calls – to justify having call centre staff.

While I am clearly not your average telephone user, I have long used chat services and IM and email to contact businesses as it is cheaper, quicker and easier. ‘Normal’ callers however don't always trust these ways of contacting business.

As a result, Ofcom is looking to re-order numbering. Again. It is also proposing insisting on putting more warning messages in calls to tell people exactly what they are likely to be spending when they call a particular number.

But will this make any difference? Probably not. To be told that a call is going to cost £X per minute doesn’t really tell you how much the call will cost, as the one variable in the equation is time.

Similarly, the move could be damaging to an already damaged PRS business, where margins are getting tighter and call volumes are on the slide.

While the arbitrage market goes from strength to strength (for better or worse) it is predicated on leveraging more and more international traffic. Domestic calling to ordinary companies for help and advise, or for important things such as enquiries to HMRC (the tax office) – something cited by Ofcom as a particular issue – are not really fit for purpose any more. While I am all for operators make some money out of calls, sometimes you have to pick your battles. Confusing ordinary people is not the modern way.

As more and more OTT services start to arrive – especially apps that let you call PRS numbers from mobile at a landline rate – then any premium on mobile calling is starting to be eroded. Maybe, while Ofcom has its rethinking cap on, it needs to look at a radical shake up of numbering and what can be used where.

I’d be interested to hear what you think…

The people have spoken: and they want mobile PoS

As 2013 progresses apace, we edge ever nearer to mobile payments breaking through into mainstream use. A study by Timetric reveals that consumer demand is going to force retailers, mobile companies and technology providers to start implementing true mobile point of sale technologies in shops.

Meanwhile, Square – which takes payments from cards onto smartphones – has decided to start wrapping local recommendations into its payments app in a drive to start to make recommendation more relevant. The thinking behind Square’s approach is to not rely on who is checking in where, but who is buying what where and what you yourself have bought. This, it believes, will help drive more mobile sales as users start to trust the recommendations.

This move away from being location-specific recommendation and with recommendations from friends driving viral uptake of services or sales, is something that we are likely to see a lot more of over the coming months. Its not so much about what your limited number of friends recommend, but more about what people who like what you like, buy what you buy and so on that will drive the next era of mobile-social recommendations.

This in turn, believes, Square at least, will drive more mobile payments.

But as consumers get evermore used to spending money on and through the mobile devices, there is potentially a black cloud looming. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has launched an investigation into whether kids – though or exclusively – are being unduly pressurized into making in app and in game purchases – especially within in free games.

The OFT believes that this is on the rise and that thousands of pounds are being somewhat coerced out of innocent players and its is being assisted by the growing ease with which consumers can pay in-app.

And this is quite a conundrum. One of the key USPs for mobile payments – especially seamless and buried payment processes – is this ease of use. Sadly, it seems that that very ease of use is being taken advantage of and millions of pounds are being pulled out of peoples’ pockets unwillingly.

It should be stressed that, at this stage, the OFT is not investigating specific breaches of the Regulations. The OFT is inviting stakeholders, including games developers and hosting services, to provide information to help it understand the prevailing practices in this market. It has set an initial deadline of 28 June for submissions. This consultation itself is expected to last until October 2013, at which point the OFT will indicate its intentions going forward.

Until the OFT publishes its initial findings those involved in supplying freemium apps will need to consider whether they are doing enough to ensure parents are aware of the practical steps they can already take to protect children including .

making sure a child using a smartphone/iPad doesn’t know the password/pin needed to make purchases.

Time to love SMS again...

It comes as no surprise that SMS revenues for operators are set to be hammered by OTT messaging services such as iMessage and Whatsapp to name but two. I know I use both extensively and now find it quite shocking when I actually have to send a text. And if text is the only option, I now try and use Facebook messaging instead – especially now I can flick my friends faces across the screen while waiting for a reply.

The rise of messaging technologies that act a bit like text is unsurprising: for starters its largely free, so of course people are going to use it. But I think it also reflects once again how out of touch with consumers network operators are. SMS became a mass market consumer tool pretty much by accident: it wasn’t designed to be used by users, it was for engineers. As more people used and started to want to share more stuff such as photos – as they increasingly were with email – operators gave us MMS. And it was rubbish.

Now operators face the same problem again. While consumers got used to doing more and more with email – but couldn’t do it via mobile easily – they wanted to do it with text. And the operators blew it. Now they have people wanting to do much more with their messages: share their location, share content and data, find out who else is near them and message them and generally start to combine all the thinks they can do with social and mobile and other apps into messaging.

And the operators appear once again to have blown it. At least if the recent research by Informa for the FT is to be believed (See front page). Users are flocking in droves to these free OTT messaging services, while social media DM is also eroding SMS numbers.

And it is set to cost the operators dearly. They are already seeing SMS profits drop and the decline appears, currently, to be exponential as more smartphones hit the market and more users switch messaging services to save money and get more functions.

But the operators don’t have to just stand by and watch it happen. SMS still has one great USP: its cross network and, so long as you can get a signal, it works. Operators need to look at how to capitalise on this and turn SMS into something far richer and far reaching for all users.

While there are moves to let text users update Facebook et al using text. The operators need to look at how to develop an all encompassing messaging service, not limited to 160 characters, that allows seamless sending of photos, movies and data, that can use location information and can be of variable charges – to allow for purchasing of things – to make it relevant and leverage its cross network, work anywhere capability.

Text need not die and it would be a shame if it did, but only the operators can save it now…

Counting the cost of falling in love with mobile

As the week of the FT Digital media conference, the mGaming and mSports Summits draw to a close, the word of mobile lies in an interesting position. After years of anticipation of this year being the “year of mobile”, it seems that the backlash, to some degree, has started.

Its like a newly dating couple: the worlds of media, retail, commerce, sport, gambling and gaming have all blurted out “I love you” on the second date and now they are suddenly having second thoughts. And like many relationships, that real problem is cost and getting on with each others friends.

Let me explain. One of the key messages coming out of the crop of mobile events this week is that mobile is the key to not just delivering a new sales channel, but rather it is the tool to gather vast amounts of data on consumers and use that to personalize down to an almost individual level.

But with this comes the problem that every vertical market looking to use mobile in some way is now looking in very realistic terms at how much all this is going to cost.  And its not a good look.

The thing about using mobile to gather data and to slice and dice and expertly market and control consumer behaviour is that it requires so much work – not least to connect all the databases for all the other channels these companies already use.  To achieve any meaningful results from doing this, compared to the level of extra business it might deliver, delivers no real ROI.

I go to a lot of these mobile conferences – heck, I chair most of them – and the message is getting ever more frenzied from the mobile technology community, showing cornucopia of things that can be done with mobile, data and CRM. The problem is that no one is listening to what the customers of this tech are saying. They want a cheap, new way to sell more stuff and they don’t want to spend much to achieve it.

Two years ago, the argument to get an app or m-website (or both) was reasonably clear and the cost relatively minor. Extending this first foray into mobile into actually trying to create omni-channel businesses and use the data and technology to any great end is a very different proposition.

One thing that has become clear to me over the past month is that what is going to happen is that ‘digital’ companies – the Amazons, the online games and gaming firms, eBay and so on – are all going to steal a march. They are starting from a digital standpoint. An established bricks and mortar business will struggle.

As one wag at mGaming Summit put it to me, its like Europe after World War Two. The countries that were bombed to oblivion now have super fast railways and highways as they basically got to build them in straight lines over the ruins. In the UK – analagous here to traditional businesses – we can never achieve that as we have to build our roads and railways and airports around thousands of years of history and sacred monuments.

This is what is happening in the mobile world. Long on promise, but to deliver it, it is going to take a lot more than the likes of, say, Weve, claiming to have 50million opted in mobile users to market to. That is immaterial. Making it happen is too expensive for the results it can, currently, yield. Maybe this year is the year that mobile starts looking online for a new lover? 

Ads boom, while social declines... inevitable?

With the mGaming and mSports Summits just around the corner on 24 April, it is interesting to see that two big things have happened that will have an impact on both these industries – and of course beyond – that perhaps take everyone in the telemedia industry by surprise: mobile advertising is actually starting to boom and established social media is starting, ever so slightly, to wane.

Mobile advertising has been growing slowly for the past decade but, much as has been the case in retail and commerce, it has finally come into its own. Brands are really getting it now and thanks to consumers doing every more on mobile rather than PCs, its reach is extending.

This of course is great news for anyone running any sort of premium mobile service as it offers a perfect storm of offering access to punters at the point of use.  But for gambling and sports in particular it offers the way to reach out to users, create new service – and to develop a lucrative revenue stream of their own based around the services they offer on mobile above and beyond just the content.

Much of what will be covered in the mGaming and mSport Summits will centre on the commerce and marketing paradigms offered up by mobile and for once this won’t be pie-in-the-sky, but will be grounded in something tangible.

No wonder then that Weve – the joint venture between the networks in the UK to pool their databases to offer a better marketing platforms – is essentially telling businesses they are going to be left out if they don’t sign up… or is that just marketing? I’m a cynic about Weve, but they will be at the mGaming Summit on 24 April, so I shall ask them.

But perhaps tempering the joy of mobile marketing finally breaking the £500m mark, is a worrying global study that suggests that “the kids” aren’t “down” with Facebook, Twitter and the like any more. No this doesn’t spell the end of social media as we know it, but it does give pause to those that are betting the farm on social. They can reach a lot of people, but unless you seed the youth market, you will be using social to reach ageing gits like me… and we have cash, but are as tight as you like.

The whole realm of social will be tackled on the 14 April at the summits, but it wil be vital that the experts on hand get to tell us all where the next social media platform is lurking…. Let’s hope their teenage kids have shared this with them and not just grunted incoherently from beneath Harry Styles hair while staring disconulately at their Vans.

To find out the answers to these tricky questions – and much much more – sign up here for the Summits