Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Roaming market: tougher times lead to innovative solutions

Roaming market is tougher than ever with the increasing regulation on the business. Considering that the European commissioner is calling roaming business as “rip-off”, we can conclude that it will not be getting any better but worse in the future.

While the operators are trying to control the expenses with more strict steering of outbound roamers, they are also trying to stimulate the usage by detecting the idle roamers and offer them different roaming packages. It is not a mystery now that the usage did not increase to the same extent as the decrease of the pricess.

Another way to increase roaming revenues can be to increase the number of roamers besides stimulating the usage. This may not make sense in the first instance, till you hear that in most of the countries almost one over three of the outbound roamers have roaming disabled when they leave the country. The rate may not be this high for European operators because of ease of travel between countries, but it is still a surprising number. It is still understandable, considering that there are many people who rarely leave their country.

Operators may have services to enabled roaming when the subscribers are abroad, but it is not easy to communicate with the subscriber as people tend to ignore the services which they do not require normally. Not all the subscribers might be aware that they can enable roaming by calling customer service from hotel, or eager to spend that time / money to do so.

Here comes the innovative solutions like Turkcell Technology's RoamActivate to rescue, which is providing a medium for the operators to reach the roaming disabled outbound subscribers to notify about ways of roaming activation. When the subscriber turns on his mobile, he gets an SMS telling about his situation and offering ways to enable roaming. In addition, RoamActivate can enable the subscriber to reach the operator call center to notify about their willingness for roaming activation. It might be mandatory by regulation to record the subscriber's order to enable roaming, preventing automatically activating roaming for the subscriber.

This unique service may look useless to some, as it is already possible to activate roaming by calls from hotel. Unfortunately, being notified of such a service and being offered to reach to the customer care free of charge from his "roaming disabled" line is making such a huge difference; so that this product is proven to be so effective in increasing the number of subscribers.

It's no surprise that tougher times lead to innovative solutions.

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