In an earlier article (http://www.mobile-financial.com/node/1501/KISS)
I wrote about the need for MNO’s to create simple and easy to use mobile
financial applications if they wish to attract critical mass to these new
offerings.
That post was about growing the revenue potential from
mobile financial services by making apps easy to discover and use.
There is another aspect of the business case to consider in
parallel of course – that is keeping your MNO costs contained when rolling out
a new service.An article caught my eye
this morning (Dongle Downsides from http://www.totaltele.com/res/ArticleDocuments/Mobile%20Broadband%20Watch/MBW_01_05_2009.pdf)
that was discussing the introduction of mobile broadband ‘dongles’ and their impact on MNO business.
According to the article a recent study by WDSGlobal had
shown “the cost to support mobile broadband products and services is up to 200%
greater than the cost to support traditional wireless products such as mobile
phones” and the “average duration of a technical support call for such products
is 28 minutes. By comparison, a technical support call for a mobile phone
averages just less than 10 minutes”.
Whilst mobile broadband ‘dongles’ aren’t the same as the
introduction of mobile financial applications there are strong parallels with
the fact that both Mobile Broadband dongles and Mobile Financial Services both
require an end-user ‘installation and configuration’ before usage.(Although in the case of broadband dongles
this is typically the installation of software on end-users laptops – a step
which is arguably more familiar to most users than download and setup of mobile
phone applications on their phones).
If the added complexity of supporting mobile financial services
is anything like that of supporting mobile broadband then MNO’s should think
carefully about their mobile financial product offerings to ensure they maximise
simplicity and reliability to keep their support costs down.
(There is probably also a lesson here for financial
institutions wanting to move into the mobile financial application space –
there are likely to similar increases in your support costs compared to
supporting internet banking as today).
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