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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