Customer Relationship Management

Today the number of customers having the prepaid mobile subscriptions in the world is quite large. This is increasing day by day since more and more customers are availing the mobile services. Most of the customers prefer to buy a prepay subscription in order to control their spend. Prepay is also beneficial proposition to the telecom operators since their risk is reduced and the money is collected in advance. Hence most of the telecom operators are trying to introduce newer ways to attract customers to their prepay offers.

For the prepay products, the customer decides in the manner in which he/she would like to recharge his account and hence there is no guaranteed income for the telecom companies every month. In order to generate the guaranteed income companies keep a limit on the period till which the customer can remain connected to the network without recharging his account. The companies also adopt a way to wave off the balance and free benefits after a period of no recharge by the customer. For prepay customers, the telecom companies terminate the call / data session immediately when the balance goes low/zero. But this impacts the customer experience.

Some of the factors that drive customer experience for the prepay customers are:

1.       Seamless service without going out of balance

2.       Controlled Monthly Spend

3.       No hassles to recharge manually and submit the customer identification document copies each time

4.       Benefits comparable to post-pay customers

5.       Per second billing

In order to increase the assured revenue from the existing prepay customers, telecom operators have adopted new business models which are similar to the post-pay models. Some of the models adopted by the operators are:

Have an agreement signed with the Customer, while purchasing the pre-paid service, for the Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), to top up the pre-paid minimum balance as and when it goes low. This EFT amount could be fixed (say for a month), so that the service providers do not deduct beyond that value.

Deduct a fixed amount every month from customers bank account towards recharge based on customers calling/spend pattern after customer consent on a fixed day of the month.

Deduct a fixed amount from customers bank account every time the customer goes low on his/her balance.

Offer additional benefits (e.g. free minutes) to the customers who are willing to adopt above two modes of payment over the regular prepay customers.

Per second calling rates.

Now with mobile micro payments being allowed, the customers can easily top up their pre-paid amount by initiating the fund transfer, through an SMS, from their bank account to the service provider (in many situations, the customer finds it difficult to go to the PoS or online to top up the pre-paid amount, in this situation, SMS based mobile fund transfer would serve handy)

By implementing the above mentioned models, telecom companies can achieve customer loyalty and retention even for the prepay customers and this results in increased assured revenue for the company.