Handset replacement rate reaching 50% — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Operators might be left behind} Handset replacement rate reaching 50%

6 Oct 2004 at 04:57 GMT Timo Poropudas

Operators and service providers are in a danger of loosing income and facing mounting customer care costs when subscriber are trading their mobile phones for new models, says SmarTrust.

According to the company Annual handset replacement rates among existing mobile users are expected to rise to over 50 percent.

SmartTrust, a mobile solutions company, estimates that by 2006, more than 50 percent of mobile users will replace their handsets annually. The ability of an operator to manage this replacement process, immediately configuring new devices to reflect new service capabilities as well as transferring existing customer settings, will be paramount to maintaining both service consistency and data revenues.

“For larger operators there will literally be millions of new handsets within the network every year,” explains Tim Deluca-Smith, communications manager for at SmartTrust.

“The majority of handsets are not preconfigured, perhaps being purchased from non-official retail outlets or passed between friends and family. Operators can’t rely on customers to proactively configure these handsets to access services such as MMS and GPRS; in fact, experience has shown that issues of complexity and user apathy result in a large percentage of handsets never actually being configured. This presents an immediate barrier to increasing ARPU.”

Those that do look to configure their handsets often use customer care centers. Device configuration enquiries already represent approximately 10 percent of all calls (supporting those unsure of the necessary settings or those that have mistakenly deleted settings). A rise in handset replacement rates is set to increase this percentage, with a negative impact on customer support costs.

Company solution

SmartTrust addresses the problem with its device management solution, SmartManage.

“Combining sophisticated network triggers and a carrier-grade OTA (over the air) platform, SmartManage offers device management support for the duration of a device’s life cycle.”

“This combines both automatic device configuration – detecting a new device on the network, understanding its capabilities and automatically configuring it accordingly – through to continued OTA support and subscriber provisioning tools to support later changes and updates,” adds Deluca-Smith.

“The solution is able to remove the complexity of handset configuration, not only supporting the customer’s requirements and delivering immediate access to all available value-added services on the network but also lowering traffic to customer care to deliver overnight cost savings.”