In the forefront

Digital business monetization: Trust is king

The creative ability to monetize telecommunication services by operators has always been a key part of this business, set on technological evolution.

With the introduction of value-added services (over the top), a product and service catalogue that is appealing and easily configurable is required (resulting in use-cases in turn of electricity consumption, security, mobility, health, entertainment among others).

In that context, it is fundamental that consumers’ comprehension grows by giving them access to consumption. Thus, promoting conscious and responsible usage and constant control over “what is being used vs. what is being charged”.

The decision to buy has always been based on mutual trust in which individuals select a product/service based on rational and emotional factors. Predictability, fairness and reasonableness are expected from that relationship. The consumer does not expect the operator to provide over-rated, expensive or abusive services. And the operator expects clients to be autonomous and to make decisions within a commercial offer that will lead to a balanced consumption of what he/she values, amongst the options available.

Acting over each individual with complex, convergent products implies greater flexibility of the commercial offer. That requires each individual consumer to have more control and power to act.

The convergence of individual usage services places new demands in what concerns the privacy of each consumer. For example, access to communication or content consumption of each family member.

Knowing how to deal with the context of each consumer, knowing how to anticipate needs, detecting offer inadequacy, anticipating distrust signs and surprising customers with balanced and contextualized commercial offers has become mandatory.

Business monetization challenges in digital service consumption

Creating a monetized ecosystem of digital services provided by telecommunication providers has the following challenges:

• Serve as a leverage for innovation of commercial offers through an ecosystem that facilitates 3^rd party service availability and respective revenue;
• Give operators the tools that permit creating an innovative commercial offer and respective forms of exposure and selling of contextualised services;
• Control complexity when selecting convergent products by simplifying commercial representation and promoting control and flexibility in the configuration;
• Promote transparency of the services subscribed and real usage – allowing users to individually control consumption – through alerts, blocking, thresholds, limit configuration etc.;
• Make near real-time tools available, permitting consumption control and the ability to act by anticipating abusive consumption (fraud, bad usage, irrationality), increasing consumer trust when using complex and composed services of diverse components;
• Protect privacy over the consumption of each individual according to his/her profile and consent.