Livewire

If a travelling mobile-user temporarily connects to another provider's service because his own provider did not offer adequate roaming, does it count as churn ? If a customer that bought a phone+DSL bundle uses a Skype-type service to make all his long distance calls, should he be included in market share ?

Consumers have become less predictable, and people's lives have taken on the parallelism and self-directing knowledge of an IP packet navigating the network. The needs of INDIVIDUAL customers are changing faster than any older notion of a generic customer market.

For communications service providers, the best approach to enhancing their capacity to anticipate change is to become the change agent itself. Market segmentation has shifted from organizaing-around-what-you-offer to organizing-around-what-people-want. It is easy to forget that even in the age of wire-line voice, the real reason someone used the phone was not primarily because the network was available, but because they loved to hear the voice of the person at the other end of the line.

Customer Integration is the new theme - and not just left to the customer service department. Loyalty programs are evolving into product co-creation for the intimacy it provides in customer relationships. Market share is passe. Wallet share is paramount. How much of each customer's needs you service is becoming more important than how many customers you service.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I attended a conference recently, that brought together broadcast studios, content providers, advertising companies, cable companies and new age video distributors (ie. telecom service providers.) It made for some very interesting conversation:

It appears to me that the media & content industry is showing the first signs of a collapsing chain. Take for instance what the iTunes store is doing to music - by putting the act of compiling CDs into the hands of end consumers. For a recording artist, this has greatly increased the risk of revenue loss on albums - for now, every single needs to be a hit song. Of course, there is a contrary viewpoint to this - that something like iTunes also vastly increases the "long tail" for niche segment songs etc. Similarly, mySpace and youTube are eliminating the "middle-parties" by collapsing the video content publishing chain. With the rise of TiVo and DVRs, advertisers are embedding their products into the actual content of TV shows. Sporting franchises are embracing the term "triple-play" in a whole new context.

Is the once linear chain of customer value delivery fast becoming a rush of players tripping over each other in an effort to directly interact with the end customer? Look at what's happening - "Intel Inside" is on the outside. Motorola markets its RAZR features directly to the end consumer so they demand it from their service providers. The Sony Store sells WLAN from Cingular.

Everyone is marketing his product using the ensemble. And any single entity's unilateral control over its marketplace has weakened considerably.

Consumers' inboxes are flooded - urging them to think out of the box.

Posted by Deepak Padaki at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Changes in services and demographics have significantly redefined the communications industry’s economic pie, and the players that contend for a slice of it. Traditional telcos, Cable TV providers, Internet portals and mobile service providers are obvious contenders. But already, city municipalities, power utilities and Hollywood studios are providing alternate access ramps to the unified communications-entertainment highway.  

Everyone’s vying for that sweet spot in the living room, bringing their own consumer interests to the party.