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Prepaid VoIP: Beyond the Card Game
How Innovative VoIP-based Prepaid Solutions Can Generate New Revenue Streams
By Ken Osowski |
Several factors are driving prepaid service providers to evaluate the potential gains of expanding their business models by adding new VoIP-based services that dovetail with their existing prepaid card services. This month, we’ll look at business case rationales for service product expansion, some potential services that may be synergistic to your existing calling card services, and briefly discuss the key service delivery platform capabilities that can optimize success and possibly drive migration.
The overarching goal for adding new services is of course obvious: revenue growth. Among the many obvious and not-so-obvious drivers for investing in service expansion are:
• You may be facing a particularly high saturation of competing card-based prepaid service providers in your regional market or targeting your primary demographic base;
• Existing sales channels may increasingly be impacting profit margins;
• Growth may be flat or on the decline, in which case it’s time to broaden your potential subscriber targets and/or better serve them. Prepaid service providers serving specific demographics (such as individual international target populations or credit challenged subscribers in a particular region) can be particularly vulnerable to sudden market shifts and demand drops, as can those serving price-sensitive potential customers who are attracted to new and increasingly economical VoBB plans.
Whatever the primary driver, multiple product lines can diversify the prepaid service provider’s vulnerabilities to large-scale market shifts and escalating competition, and provide a degree of buffer against routine cyclical slow-downs during post-holiday periods, for example. A multi-service strategy will also help improve utilization of your network resources, whether facilities-based or leased, by spreading your service capacity beyond existing business busy-hours & network saturation points.
Finally, expanding business models beyond calling card services enables prepaid service providers to leverage the major cost advantages of SIP peering and the global growth in available IP Service POP interconnects, enabling the economic creation and/or expansion of a far-reaching, iron-light service infrastructure.
Worth Considering: Potential Prepaid Services To Drive New Revenues
With very modest investments, IP-based prepaid service providers can more fully utilize their existing network, channel and business assets to create, market and deliver new services such as prepaid residential broadband and even business broadband. Forget the outdated phone company mindset. This seemingly ambitious service can actually be easily integrated into existing IP service delivery platforms and marketed via many of the same local and regional channels that prepaid service providers already tap into. Economical service applications now incorporate the same ‘big network’ features that subscribers readily recognize and want: call waiting, voicemail, 3-way calling, etc. The main difference with prepaid VoBB is that it targets specific demographics: either credit-challenged or price-sensitive, and in a local or regional market.
A similarly cost-effective and loyalty-building incremental service is ANI authenticated, prepaid long distance calling, supporting existing VoIP services. This prepaid IP service can be similarly marketed synergistically, and is targeted to existing regional and demographic residential phone service subscribers. It brings significant new value, convenience and service affordability to residential customers by allowing them to use both card-based and ANI-based services to economically make calls from any wireless or landline phone, and derive the same economic advantages and service accessibility as card-based customers.
Expanded multi-party conference calling is another service that neatly expands existing prepaid VoIP service product offerings, enabling multi-national small businesses and social groups, such as extended families, to include several members in a single call. This service can target both new ‘event service’ opportunities – family celebrations and holidays, for example – and also bring new conferencing capabilities and affordability to captive business and consumer subscribers, such as the rapidly growing base of wireless-only users.
These types of services can drive expansion of prepaid VoIP services upscale, and can even help prepaid service providers to reach Greenfield users such as previously access-challenged, single-network served subscribers now coming on line in alternative WiMAX deployments.
VoIP Service Platform Requirements for Multi-Service Business Model Expansion
Whether you’re entering the prepaid market, expanding your service capacity or considering migration, your VoIP service delivery platform (SDP) can & should support all types of subscriber services as well as typical card-based consumers. Choose an IP SDP that lets you incorporate state-of-the-art residential VoBB services and integrate advanced prepaid capabilities. This shouldn’t be an either/or proposition as most leading SDPs now support or can be structured to support multiple services.
Your shopping list for specific IP platform capabilities should include:
• Sophisticated multi-mode billing support:
· For example, CDRs that output to any billing system and support multiple billing formats simultaneously.
· Robust prepaid billing features such as call-in-process debiting during calls, eliminating the potential for fraud.
• Essential residential/business VoBB line-side features:
· For example, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, anonymous call blocking, voice mail, etc for a PSTN-like subscriber experience.
• An innovation-friendly architecture to simplify ongoing customizations & enhancements:
· Rapid creation & deployment of differentiating & demographic-specific line-side features
– Future-proofs against both ongoing competition and regulatory requirements (disability accessibility, E911 integration)
• Global deployment capabilities:
· integrated multi-language IVR and currency conversions,
· least-cost routing and operator assistance,
· enabling economical market expansion and regional service initiations; and
• Transport-agnostic service delivery that enables transport across all available routes, and that works with or readily adapts for all customer end point types.
For growth-oriented prepaid service providers, there are clear opportunities to move beyond the card game. Next month, we’ll look at the news from the VON Show, the preeminent VoIP forum.
Ken Osowski is the VP of Marketing & Product Management at Pactolus Communications Software. He can be reached at Keno@pactolus.com.
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