Mobile operators are struggling to find the right approach to designing data services that consumers pay for and use regularly. Although users are willing to try new data features (such as the camera, Internet services, or ringtone downloads), most do not become long-term daily users. In fact, 90% of data services features go unused for weeks or even months on the average consumer’s mobile phone. Does having too many features help or hurt consumer adoption of data services?
For the past eight years, a team of consultants including myself has helped large mobile carriers (eg, Vodafone, Sprint-Nextel, Orange, and T-Mobile) learn how consumers use their mobile data services. To do this, we collect transaction logs from the network components these services pass through, often analyzing hundreds of millions of records for tens of millions of users. We wanted to know exactly what attracted consumers, how long consumers spent with each service, and which services had the most repeat visitors.
We soon discovered that carriers were failing their consumers in two main areas: carriers refused to drop data services that failed; and most operators were not investing adequately to improve the key services that were succeeding. Mobile phones have too many features, the worst features drive users away before they find the best features, and the best features don’t get the extra attention they need to keep users coming back.
There were bright spots in our work. Virgin Mobile USA, for example, is very good at keeping a small but well-performing selection of data services, only introducing features when it makes sense for its target audience of teens and young adults. This led Virgin Mobile to significantly better “stickiness” performance, which is a measure of how often users return to use services. Another bright spot was Vodafone Italy, which was the best at finding and improving its key services. Vodafone was the first operator in Europe to use business intelligence to discover the persistence of “Chat” services (discovered in 2000), and they were the most consistent in using business intelligence to identify roadblocks or speed bumps that were causing user frustration. . The results for these two operators were strong loyalty to data services from their users, along with higher returns.
We continue to find the same patterns: the majority of consumers (85%) do not find acceptable value on their first try with new data services. People spend just a few minutes (3.4 minutes) looking at just a couple of features (1.2 serves) before giving up. Half (45-65%) of new users give up every time the product introduces a new decision or task. A few (7-15%) of the most determined users, the advanced users, may find the services more complicated (or the value of the service). Only the simplest products and features are winners.
Take WAP-based services, for example. Almost all operators in the world offer these services to their users in the form of a hierarchical menu of third-party sites. If a user wants a sports result, navigate to the “Sports” menu and then select from 4-5 sports sites. These menus are presented in an operator-centric approach to ensure the most diverse selection of services. Unfortunately, the goal is not to solve the user’s real need (“What is the Seahawks current game score?”), but rather to address the operator’s arbitrary concerns (“Will the user stop using our service? if we don’t carry ESPN? “).
When looking at these types of menus (ie a sports menu with 4 or 5 sites), we found that there was only one great service that 80-90% of frequent users returned to repeatedly. The other sites were not used by these intensive “in-the-know” users. This contrasts with the experience we found for new users (first-time visitors to the services). Obviously, new users didn’t know yet which sports site was going to be useful, so they always selected the first site on the list (very few tried other services). If the menu order was not based on quality of services (or, worse, alphabetical), then new users who normally visited a lousy site had a bad experience and never became repeat users. .
In short, we learned that mobile operators need to shift their focus from “we have the most features” to “we have the best features,” where they identify the services that count for consumers and abandon the services that turn consumers away. To learn more about these analytics services, visit www.consumerease.com.
