Why we pay when we Call?
Everymonth same question : Why shall I pay this horrible mobile bill?
Reflex-logic tells me it’s because there is my name on it, I am the person who did all these calls, who used all this bandwidth and all these services.
But what do I pay for?
When I place my calls I take the initiative of starting bipartial exchanges and if people I am calling (Hillary, Pico, Woody) don’t reply, I don’t pay.
If they accept my calls, then they confirm the fact that it is also a good initiative for them.In this case it is also a good initiative for my operator because I confirm the usefulness of the service that is provided to me. Well, for the operator of the receiver it sucks a bit, because during all this time I pay my operator, Pico cannot initiate any rewarding conversations for his operator. Which is another evil benefit for my operator, since I crunch competitors’ revenues.
So why do I have to pay for taking such a good initiative?
Well, this corrosive question was planted in my mind around ‘98 or ’99 or ‘97 (I don’t really remember) through eeea.gr, but at the time having a mobile phone was rather generating social value and competitive advantage over rigid fixed-line communicators so model was right. Plus I was too young too pay for anything and thus to ask questions on my business model and how it fits with my mobile operator’s one.
But now that I am surrounded by attention-driven models and staples are harder to find on a desk than cellphones, I find paying for calls I place simply obsolete and naive.
Obsolete because I am child of the attention-era. I am immersed in a world that the more buzz you create the more precious you are considered (name it web socializing or coffee-brake storytelling it is always business and if you want to calculate your ubiquous score just play with this socialbomb game). Under these criteria, buzz is more valuable than the business itself. So if I buzz I should get the business (the call) for free as a minimun reward.
Naïve, because charging only for duration is reducing the communications’ value chain
to a single parameter. Driving earth flat again.
And behavioral yield? Why not rewarding me for calling numbers I used to/could call from skype or fixed lines? For calling people I haven’t called for some time? For calling people that have a free line (because they work for an operator not because they have a corporate contract)? Why not penalizing me for ringing?
And geography?
My operator is totally indifferent if I use my mobile from my bathtub or from a train in Marseille.
And so on…
Most people that do dollarious bills, don’t go through their notices to verify them. We don’t have a personal registry to compare it to the one we receive from our operator. Only when it feels completely absurd we will go through the verification Golgotha. (when for example your operator decides that you have moved out of the country because you have a boyfriend in another country and therefore charges you with roaming prices for all local calls ! ..!!yes yes).
So billing should first create the feeling that it is fair. And complex models based on behavior are very good at this.
Marketing is very good to acquire new customers but we won’t stay loyal to something that it doesn’t feel right. Look at facebook, does it charge you for throwing sheep to people?
Well I only hope that my operator won’t begin intelligizing his billing by adding the parameter “ corrosive bigmouth”…
… end of story- I’d better prepare my “Why I love my operator xxx” article
… sweetness, sweetness I was only joking…
Georgia
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Hey Georgia,
Correct me if I’m wrong guys, but usually, in the US you get charged also if you get called or receive texts (otherwise, cingular tricked me quite nicely for quite some time…).
So you don’t really get to crunch competitors’ revenues
That’s true! Horrible! It took me like half an hour to spot this term in the contract but you do…And you have a restriction on your off-net activity as well.
So if AT&T customer service calls you, or sends you an alert sms do you still pay? In fact, do they practice push customer service?
Hey, I still crunch competitors’ euros… In France and in Greece you don’t pay for receiving domestic calls. But we have roaming, to point out the difference in geographical analogies and the fact that we are in a very early stage of federalization as EU.
Is this the reason it works like this in the US?
You know what would be fun? If every call gave you the choice of paying the whole thing, half of it, or none of it. There are some people, whose initiative I appreciate, e.g. a future (non) employer, who takes the time to tell me how the interview went. I’ll pay for that, even more so if the response is quick.
There are other people who possibly think I should be grateful for calling me or me calling them, and all they do is blablabla, sometimes for 10 min. long. They don’t care who pays, rather they just want to be heard. Fine. Pay for it.
And others, where there’s mutual value, a girlfriend/boyfriend chat maybe. And an early signal of a breakup would be that one party insists on paying for the call…
Anyway, interesting way of looking at things, Georgia (as usual). I think the current model is very profitable for operators, and easy to understand. There’s probably advantages to the latter. But to compete with other (free) mediums, perhaps such a business-model would be a killer. I can’t tell, would have to conduct some behavioral tests, but I definitely like this idea!
Cool, I love the behavioral semaphore! Shouldn’t be that hard to set up, it is actually like cash-MSN.
I would suggest strong cultural personalization however, because in Greece for example if the boyfriend doesn’t insist on paying the call, it consists a break-up trigger!
There’s another service for global operators: communications savoir faire coaching for nomads.
Well, I think that current model is just a best effort solution to come up with offers with lush marketing without touching dinosaurian IT billing systems of operators. Correct me if I am wrong, but reforming IT billing is a min. 5 years project. Your options as a client change very often (less than a year period) but you always come up with the same bill at the end. Marketing isn’t supposed to change what you pay.
I’m in for the tests !