Ofcom’s sixth Communications Market Report garnered a lot of attention, but the main talking point has to be the extreme importance that consumers place in person to person communications.
Mobile phones have become ubiquitous, to the point that, despite the recession, consumers only rate food as more important for their outgoing expenditure, according to the Ofcom Communications Market Report 2009.
Taking this further, Opencloud states that from its own research of 1000 UK consumers that users view call and text prices as more important than 3G and social networking capabilities.
Indeed, over 80% of consumers see call and text prices as the most important factors when looking for a new phone, whereas two thirds of respondents view social networking applications as luxury additions and non-essential.
What operators are realising is that to help prevent customer attrition and in turn to improve stickiness, is the need to provide personalised services to give users even more of an emotional and psychological attachment to their mobile phones, said Opencloud.
“The use of more sophisticated CRM will allow operators to create and launch more tailored services that are based on personal needs and behavioural trends. And in much shorter timescales than has traditionally been the case,” said Graham Francis, marketing manager at OpenCloud. “With 95% of revenues coming from voice and messaging services, we’re not talking about a back to basics approach with voice and text, but quite the opposite. What the operators are realising is that by mining data about their customers and using it to build profiles and, in turn, provide timely, personalised and useful services, they can actually complement and enhance their customers’ lifestyle and workplace communication needs.”