How mobile telecom operators have failed our economy
How the mighty fell! A quick look back shows us that the mighty Nokia and Blackberry who once dominated the mobile telephone market in India, were decimated as they failed to transform and meet evolving customer requirements. Initially, the mobile operators in India tagged along with the handset manufacturers and used their brand power. However, they switched their affiliations to new smartphones loaded with applications that offered solutions to the end consumers. What they have failed to do is to become an integrated solutions provider and merely remained as entities that offered individual applications. India, the second largest mobile telecom market in the world, is crowded with eight major private sector operators and the state-owned BSNL. These firms continue to fight between them for plain vanilla mobile voice and data while operators in markets such as USA and even China have moved aggressively, positioning themselves as solution marketers using mobile carriage as a means to deliver customised solutions.
Not a single mobile operator in India fares anywhere near acceptable levels of customer satisfaction benchmarked against mature markets such as USA. This may not sound very strange considering that customer service does not rank very high in India. But why is this happening? Two key issues are important to explain customer dissatisfaction:
(1) Slogging their respective organisations for more and more voice and data connections and continuous cost-cutting have been their main game, leading to poor network quality, and
(2) The service provider's failure or inability to take ownership of providing solutions through applications. There is an urgent need to address both these issues if they are to provide quality service to their customers.
As the play between the operators became all about beating the other through spectrum hogging and per second call price wars, rather than innovative solutions for specific markets, they missed the rivers of gold flowing right in front of them - the mobile applications requirements of both domestic and enterprise customers. These customers see a wireless interconnected world without boundaries and little barriers of entry, but don't have operators to help them reach there. Until the new spectrum allocation last week, the focus was on voice and data carriage quality due to inadequate spectrum. But realising that carriage is only the critical means to an end known as applications and solutions required by customers, there are limited attempts from some operators to offer platforms to develop applications. But the sad reality is that none of the Indian operators have transformed to become mobile solution providers. They are still primarily operators providing mobile voice and WiFi. Selling low order, low margin voice and data services is highly commoditised compared to solution marketing that requires developing closer relationships with customers, gathering insights into their business drivers and becoming innovative partners with application developers. Collectively they also failed to latch on to India's global software superpower, partner with any number of smart application developers who lead the world markets, and develop mobile solutions that could have transformed India in sectors like health, education, infrastructure, banking and finance and food distribution.
Ask any major enterprise customer with a telecom spend of say five crore rupees per month and they would say their operators have never spoken to them about how they could offer value added services in developing mobile applications, that would could transform the way they do business, and connect better with their customers in order to service them. They themselves are desperate, watching their customer base eroded by e-tailers and smart web based mobile applications. Mobile operators have also underestimated the ability of Google and Facebook et al to go to enterprise market and offer mobile solutions in spite of not owning mobile carriage capability.
Spectrum is a scarce natural resource and mobile operators have a social obligation to utilise it innovatively for the socioeconomic development of the country while making money. Telecom operators owe it to the country and themselves to transform into solution providers using smart mobile applications. Those operators who do not transform will stagnate in the voice and data space and will see their connections ported out to those who offer integrated mobile applications with customised solutions.