Archive for June 19th, 2008
Are you an Alpha user?
The Alpha User is a human networking hub. The Alpha User is someone who loves to communicate with everyone and keeps the social group connected and informed. The Alpha User is also earlier in adopting most operator’s services than the peers on the same social network.
That does not make an Alpha User the same as an “Early Adopter” but rather, that among each discrete community, the Alpha User tends to be the one of the earliest adopters within that community.
The group itself could be very laggard in adopting a service – likely for example for the older ladies of the bridge club – or can be a group of all early adopters such as for example broadband users’ group today. Each such group will have one Alpha User who leads the adoption of new communication technologies to that group. Alpha Users are natural teachers of any new technology they like. Think of it, who was the person who taught you to send an SMS, or an MMS. These people are very likely to be Alpha Users.
So, are you an Alpha user? You might not be interested in knowing, but let me tell you that your mobile operator is really interested.
The Alpha User is the ideal evangelist for anything new that we might offer to that community. Because the Alpha User tends to be the earliest in adopting new communication technologies the Alpha User is eager to learn about and trial new telecoms services. If the Alpha User likes the new service or product, he/she will immediately start to promote its brilliance to all in his/her community who would most be attracted to the service. The Alpha User will do this without any of our active promotion or pushing. The Alpha User feels compelled to tell the world about the latest greatest discovery. If we then recruit the Alpha Users, reward him/her for promoting the service, a perfect partnership is formed.
There is always a right price.
We are currently working for a mobile operator in France who is questioning if there’s a right price to offer in the market they are targeting. The extreme competition in place, plus a declining pricing tendency in the market, requires executing an optimal pricing project to solve this question.
But make no doubt about it and skip the guesswork: there’s always a right price depending on the pricing strategy followed by the operator. Optimal pricing can be used to maximize profit through determining empirically the current clients de-positioning (that is, clients paying more that they should according to the existing plans and their traffic pattern), and defining corrective pricing measures to retain clients and stimulate ARPU levels.
There are two key questions for all mobile telecom operators:
• Which is the premium tariff cost that my users are paying, compared with my competitors?
• Can the optimum price per minute —where profits are maximized — be estimated?
Both questions can be solved through a simple, but powerful, tool we use in most of our pricing projects: PRICING HEAT MAPs. So what is this? Heat maps are a graphical representation of the best pricing price available depending on the MOUs consumed and the traffic pattern of consumption. (traffic pattern can be measured in % of net call, off net calls, peak time, off-peak time or a combination of these four variables). An example of it can be seen in the following slide:
