It was a pleasure to meet so many of you at our stand at the Mobile World Congress and at the side events organised in Barcelona during the last week of February. Here are the key insights we brought home:

Self-help is the most efficient way of reducing customer support CAPEX
There is no question that technical and after-sales support of smart devices is currently one of the major headaches for telecom operators.
At the MWC we collected general agreement that empowering the customer to self-help not only is the most efficient way of reducing interaction costs, it also allows collecting a wealth of extremely valuable information from users on the real issues in the field. Such information is essential in providing a more personalised service and in supporting marketing and provisioning decision-making. Further benefits of a self-help app are that it provides a footprint for the MNOs brand on the end-user device and a channel for educated cross & up-selling, improving visibility and generating revenue.
A Case Study using WebToGo’s Self-Diagnostics app is available here.

Ease of use and user experience are the key to successfully providing access to the Operator’s services
On-Device-Portals are the customer’s access point to the services provided by its MNO or MVNO. While many apps can be found on the app stores, they not always enjoy positive user evaluation.
In a world dominated by social networks and media your customer’s evaluation can be seriously damaging, especially for apps which aim to foster transparency over the consumption and usage of your mobile subscription. Our take-home message from the MWC is that many MNOs and MVNOs would benefit from a version 2.0 of their On-Device-Portals to improve the user-experience and ease-of-use of these critical CRM tools.
A good On-Device-Portal today should be cross-platform, to reach the whole customer base, and should include the management of multiple-devices and shared data-plans as a key functionality to encouraging consumers, especially those who prefer prepayment, to spend more on mobile data consumption.
A case study about a top-ten Telco’s On-Device-Portal is available here.

Connectivity is still in demand: MVNOs and Corporations
The demand for connection managers has undoubtedly seen a drop proportional to that of USB dongles and MiFi in favour of smarter devices and means of connection such as tethering.
While this drop primarily affected MNOs and their need to provide a connection manager to support the ample variety of devices, at the MWC we confirmed that there are cases where a smart connection manager is still a very strong requirement.
Two such examples are: MVNOs for whom efficient offloading of data traffic from the mobile network to WiFi translates into immediate cost savings. The other is global companies and businesses that rely on mobile workforces who often have their own APNs and will always have rules and policies as to how the connection is made available, used and secured.
The great thing about connectivity software today is that it is very stable, mature and feature-packed technology which can easily be customised to meet any requirement across platforms.
A case study in the insurance sector is available here.