We’ve all the heard the highly publicized recent tale about an unsuspecting wireless subscriber who was shocked to receive a six-figure mobile phone bill that included tens of thousands of dollars in international roaming charges. While the story made sensational news and is certainly an extreme example, bill shock can happen both domestically and internationally if subscribers grossly overuse their data applications without an appropriate service plan or their voice services without understanding the roaming and per-minute charges involved.
A 2010 survey commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission found that more than 30 million Americans are affected by bill shock each year. This translates to nearly 1 in 5 Americans who have been hit by unexpected charges on their cellphone bills. The survey, which was conducted on behalf of the FCC by Abt/SRBI and Princeton Survey Research Associates, also revealed that the vast majority of respondents who experienced bill shock believed that their wireless carrier had made no effort to warn them about it.
In response to these findings, CTIA, in conjunction with the FCC and the Consumers Union, recently announced the Wireless Consumer Usage Notification Guidelines, a proactive, industry-backed program to provide subscribers with free alerts before and after they reach their monthly voice and data limits.
The new guidelines will be integrated into the industry trade organization’s existing Consumer Code for Wireless Service and cover alerts for data, voice, text and international roaming. Wireless carriers have agreed to implement two of these four types of alerts within the first year beginning in October 2012, and all four by April 2013.
This is a positive sign that wireless carriers are committed to stemming bill shock and strengthening their relationships with subscribers. However, it is clearly the first salvo in what will be a protracted process to deliver customer-centric programs that help consumers better manage their wireless usage.
Initial plans call for carriers to employ voice mail and SMS text messages to deliver alerts to subscribers. While both may appear to be viable options, they are becoming increasingly ineffective as tools for resolving the bill shock dilemma. In a world where consumers are often overwhelmed by information overload and too often resort to avoidance as a coping strategy, other solutions are needed.
Traditional voice mail service has been around for almost 40 years, and Americans spend more than 1 billion hours annually recording, managing and listening to voice messages according to a 2010 study by Yap. The study also shows that Americans receive more than 70 billion voice mail messages annually.
While this may seem fathomable in the digital age, more concerning is the fact that, according to a recent Wired magazine story by Clive Thompson, more than a fifth of all voice messages are never heard. All indications are that voice mail as we know it is coming to an end in an era in which instant gratification is demanded.
These statistics may seem to point in the direction of SMS text messaging as a more natural alternative to voicemail, but SMS usage as a customer care tool is exploding and will surely reach a saturation point as well. With the now ubiquitous use of text-based personal messaging, this platform just doesn’t pack the punch necessary to solve the bill shock dilemma. For example, Neustar revealed that 2.5 billion text messages are sent each day in the U.S.
At Cenoplex, we are working to transform customer care for wireless operators by harnessing the gap between call placement and call connection. Our goal is to make it easier for wireless operators to communicate more effectively and intelligently with their customers by placing precisely targeted Actionable Audio Messages into the call stream of any mobile phone. Our customer-centric technology inserts a four-second audio message into the call sequence between the time that a caller hits the ‘call/send’ button and the moment they begin to hear the ring on the other end. AAMs allow wireless operators to reach customers 100 percent of the time with precisely targeted and timely messages, from warnings about data service overages to alerts about international roaming charges.
AAMs can be a powerful augment to the traditional tools for reaching customers. In addition to being completely unavoidable and requiring no additional dialing into voice mail or reading of text messages, AAMs make it possible for subscribers to either delay their dialed call and be dropped into the right place in the IVR stream for immediate issue resolution, or they can choose to receive further instructions and support via SMS, MMS or a WAP-enabled page without interrupting the call sequence itself.
In addition to an array of other options including live voice alerts, IVR, hotline resolution and text messages, we are convinced that AAMs are an ideal augment to the carrier’s bill shock strategy as they give wireless carriers a definitive acknowledgement that subscribers have received the targeted alerts required under the new agreement with the FCC.
We recently announced an AAM pilot program with Iowa Wireless Services (i Wireless), a partnership between T-Mobile USA and Iowa Network Services, the first ever implementation of our pre-call message insertion technology. Currently being undertaken as an internal test program, we expect to roll out the Cenoplex solution in a larger subscriber trial with i Wireless and other U.S. wireless operators next year.
I applaud the wireless carriers and the industry as a whole for taking the necessary steps toward answering the needs of subscribers as embodied in the CTIA’s cooperative guidelines with the FCC. This is indeed an exciting time for our industry. The bill shock dilemma challenges us to consider alternative and complementary services and solutions — not only AAMs, but a mix of targeted, unavoidable messages, delivery platforms and self-management solutions.
Meeting the bill shock challenge is a win-win for wireless providers and consumers alike, as we strive to achieve lower customer care costs while simultaneously eliminating shocking cellphone bills.
Gregory O. Welch is the president and CEO of Austin-based Cenoplex Inc. With eight companies to his credit, his 20-year career has covered multiple facets of the telecommunications industry including executive roles with a global reseller, MVNO, facilities-based carrier with infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad, and a software developer.
