The CCA’s recent Mobile Carriers Show brought together regional and rural carriers from across the U.S. to discuss the challenges impacting their businesses and discover new ways to create value for their brands. A key highlight of the show was the “Pitch Perfect Keynote Lunch” that challenged six companies to pitch their best revenue generating solutions for carriers, in six minutes or less.
Interop’s President and CEO, John Dwyer, spoke with conviction and commitment as he addressed the operator crowd and talked about ‘Reclaiming the Messaging Value Cain” with Rich Communication Services (RCS). We’ve highlighted his top points for you here:
The 3 Steps to Reclaiming the Messaging Value Chain:
1. Take Back Your Subscribers: Rebuild your delivered value for subscribers through the messaging inbox...the most powerful “app” you still control and subscribers trust and use most often. RCS is native and makes messaging the new “killer app.”
2. Deliver Feature Parity: Provide excitement for your subscribers with the OTT-like features and functionality they love that is provided by RCS to develop opportunities for personalized upgrades and customer care initiatives.
3. Rebuild Messaging Revenue: Brands want and need carriers to connect them with their target audience (the subscriber) and carriers need brands to create a new stream of revenue opportunities for them. RCS enables the participation in conversational commerce.
Regional carriers are facing hard decisions this year as new technologies continue to disrupt their long-standing business models and traditional approach to the market. While the global mobile industry is moving towards the realization of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), many carriers are still navigating their path for 4G/ LTE, IP/IMS and digital transformation.
The mobile market today simply isn’t what it was even a decade ago. The convergence of the mobile and Internet worlds was just the catalyst of the “always-on” consumer we see today. Unfortunately, their demands have continued to accelerate at a speed that many regional carriers have been unable to catch. Their infrastructure and operations simply weren’t developed for it. The subscribers who were once mesmerized by traditional carrier offerings have now become enticed by the shiny new technologies being served instantaneously on their smartphone through apps, Chabot’s and AI- connected devices. Leaving the Telco-bred mobile carrier with a significant feature gap compared to their IP-incubated OTT counterparts.
As John Dwyer stated in his “keynote pitch” to carriers last week, “Regional carriers must fight back against the companies that are using carrier networks as dumb pipes for their own business gains. Mobile carriers have deployed the expensive networks, bought the needed spectrum and spent the capital to create and update their Telco-grade systems, all while these competing companies launch simple messaging apps to leverage this excellence and create value with your subscribers—value that rightfully belongs to you, the mobile carrier.”
The messaging value chain has definitely been broken, but the value can be reclaimed if carriers can refocus their business on enhancing the subscriber’s experiences first, not their revenue. Innovation has replaced demand with the quest for personalization and messaging is still the most popular channel for engagement. Carriers are already equipped with the two most important assets required for engagement, the potential for ubiquity and the native messaging inbox. There’s no denying that subscribers have enjoyed the features that the app revolution has provided them, but they don’t necessarily want to download yet another app…not anymore.
The global mobile industry is indeed fighting back and standing up to create an environment to leverage carrier ubiquity and the native messaging inbox to make it the new and true “killer app” using the latest Rich Communication Services (RCS) standards. With RCS, carriers can provide reliable text-messaging functionality with an assortment of additional communication and multimedia experiences. Once launched, carriers will be connected to the global RCS universe and can build upon its feature-rich foundation to participate in the Messaging-as-a-Platform (MaaP) ecosystem. MaaP will combine the functionality of RCS with chatbots, AI, APIs, and plugins to support conversational commerce experiences for subscribers and enable new revenue streams for carriers. The GSMA and OpenMarket confirm in their recent research study that consumers are overwhelmingly excited about RCS and we believe that mobile carriers should be excited too!
Pitch Perfect Keynote Lunch:
Watch as John Dwyer addresses CCA Members
