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Consumers have had it good so far with Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS). Jokes, caller ringback tones, wallpapers, news, cricket scores, education, stock information, television, dating and chatting services, games, contests, astrology, movie tickets...they've all helped to increase subscriber spends, ensuring that customers extract more from their handsets. If consumers can be lured into using VAS, why not enterprise customers?
Enterprises have been cautious about MVAS until recently because of unpredictable services. However amongst the biggest reasons enterprises will now be keen to use MVAS is that network speed, availability, and reliability have improved considerably. Simultaneously, mobile access costs and handset costs are coming down, making MVAS an attractive proposition to explore.
Having sensed interest from enterprises, MVAS providers are innovating to improve workplace efficiency, increase productivity, help businesses stay in touch with their customers, and improve customer experience.
How has PayTM Evolved?
A PwC study in 2011 called Value Added Services: The Next Wave? Connect with the Consumer says that the mobile VAS market in India has the potential to generate over `50,000 crore. And this estimate does not take into consideration how mWallets are making those numbers swell. In fact, a number of businesses on the periphery of MVAS are cropping up, changing the traditional dynamics of the business. A case in point is Paytm (www.paytm.com) that lets users recharge their prepaid mobile accounts online.
Paytm could be considered as an m-commerce service that is also an MVAS. As the Paytm service has evolved, it has begun to encompass recharge of data cards, DHT subscriptions, and lately even toll cards. Paytm is adding thousands of subscribers each day to its service, many of whom have a healthy unused cash balance in their accounts at any given point of time.
Potentially, Paytm could sell any digital goods to its account holders. Quite suddenly, a player like Paytm, which appeared to be on the periphery of the mobile ecosystem can find itself firmly embedded in the business end.
With such innovation in the consumer space, enterprises are also keen to benefit from mobile services. However it is providers who can ensure low capex and low opex models through hosted services for enterprise/SME customers that will take the lead.
Hosted enterprise MVAS services are just starting to build traction. Enterprise MVAS will soon mimic the development of hosted IT services. They have the ability to transform businesses. From a CIO perspective, this is the right time to consider developing an enterprise MVAS strategy. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is building the backbone for cheap and easy mobile deployment within an organization.
Employees are comfortable with their mobile devices and since they are happy to use their own devices, hardware budgets need not be stretched. Most CIOs also love the fact that mobile users upgrade devices fairly frequently, ensuring that the organizations use the latest technology.
The enterprise strategy for MVAS, however, needs to rest on some simple principles:
- Enterprise MVAS solutions must be network agnostic. MVAS services should be able to run independent of the platform?the idea is to focus on availability of the service, regardless of network characteristics and architecture.
- MVAS solutions must be compatible with current signaling technology as well as next-gen technologies?the idea is to ensure that investments can be leveraged over as long a period as possible (given that mobile technology is changing rapidly and most investments seem to become useless fairly quickly).
- MVAS solution development should be in the hands of a creative team?mobility presents a rich landscape of users, devices, applications, and services that can be leveraged using imagination and inventiveness.
- MVAS deployment and management should be in the hands of specialists-the IT departments should strategies and provide the partner with insights into business needs and usage, but leave the actual service in the hands of experts. Often, this may mean outsourcing the capability and ensuring cost savings.
The growth in remote and mobile workforces itself is throwing up vast opportunities for enterprise MVAS. There are other problems as well. Think about it for a moment. When you call a colleague on a mobile number, you sometimes wonder, 'Is he at work or is he playing golf?' You never think the same way when you call a colleague over an office phone extension.
So, the question is: Can mobile workers be integrated into the enterprise better if their mobile phones were part of the PBX system? To do this, a mobile phone must be treated an 'extension number' on the PBX. In effect, your colleague, who may be sitting 1,000 miles away from you in an office (or playing golf!) in another country, may actually be just an extension number on the office PBX. Suddenly, the way you think of the colleague changes.
Such an enterprise solution would call for deployment of cloud solutions that bring together a variety of technologies such as mobile, fixedline, IP, and softphone (you now see why enterprise MVAS should be left to experts). The challenge is to ensure that service functionality remains consistent across networks and devices that come into play within such an ecosystem.
What Potential does Enterprise MVAS Hold?
Enterprise MVAS has a crucial role to play in improving communication and collaboration within businesses. As an example, can an MVAS provider help bring together all the messaging platforms-email, SMS, BlackBerry Messenger Services, Twitter and Facebook feeds, voicemails, video conferencing, etc-spread across desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones into a unified messaging system? Can it bring together contacts and calendars from varied sources into one central repository to ensure smoother and better communication and collaboration within an enterprise?
In fact serious enterprises are actively adopting what is called a Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC). Simply put, UCC spans voice communication, data, IP telephony, video conferencing, instant messaging, contact books, calendars, etc, unifying them for ease of use.
A global study called 2012 Economic Impact of SIP in the Enterprise recently released by Sonus Networks (Nasdaq: SONS), a leader in SIP (Session Initiation Protocol used to control communication sessions), suggests that enterprises could make savings in million of dollars by implementing UCC infrastructure.
The study showed that knowledge workers could reduce productivity loss by 23%. Average savings, the study indicated, could be about $13,000 per year per knowledge worker. Those are the kind of MVAS services that enterprises want.
Enterprise MVAS has many other possibilities. Services could be aimed at acquiring more customers or engaging them with mobile and social apps to build deeper relationships, mine more customer data or even reward them over the mobile channel. Case studies by MVAS providers have shown dramatic results.
For example, Dulux says it achieved a 15% increase in sales via mobile sales promotions and Maggi increased its reach by 2X through mobile brand engagement. QR codes, mCoupons, and voice broadcasts are all innovations aimed at improving customer relationships.
Sunil Lalvani
The author is director, enterprise sales, RIM India
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in