Stuart Corner
Monday, 28 January 2008 08:55
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
These results are hardly startling, nor were they difficult or costly to arrive at: The SNAPin survey was carried out by a market research firm among 1961 adults, representative of the UK population, and was undertaken between 18th and 20th December 2007. In other words, every handset manufacturer and cellular service provider must be well aware of these figures. But what are they doing about it?
That is where SNAPin comes in. The company's handset-based SelfService product suite is claimed to "enable the delivery of interactive promotions, the resolution of most customer support problems, and allows operators to deliver a branded service experience to their subscribers."
On the promotional side, its technology helps operators promote new services by enabling them to present customers with "targeted offers that are highly relevant and tied to the context of the subscriber's own behaviour." Its application "react to user events as they occur on the mobile device, with context sensitive triggers offering just the right content or service at just the right time, delivering them in a much more visually compelling way, as compared to other forms of promotional messages."
The support side, however sounds much more interesting. SNAPin SelfService "intercepts calls to customer support organisations and presents each user with personalised tools to resolve most support issues on the device, quickly and easily solving as many as three out of four customer problems without requiring a call to the service centre." SNAPin SelfService "automatically repairs critical device and network settings, such as those required for roaming, messaging, or data networking. In many cases, configuration settings are detected and repaired even before the subscriber is aware of the potential problem."
For complex problems that cannot be resolved automatically, SelfService can triage the problem on the handset, place a call to the appropriate customer support group—such as the group responsible for mobile email—and enable real-time remote troubleshooting over-the-air (OTA) to resolve the problem.
The company claims impressive RoIs on its technology saying: "A typical mobile operator with 10 million subscribers will receive a positive one year return on investment with SNAPin, and will save $US400 million over three years...Many operators take calls from 30 percent of their base every month, with live agents taking the majority of calls and costing $4-6 per minute."
