Beware: Blatant plug ahead…

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the SMS long tail, about how carriers are just now starting to free up revenue sharing agreements for content providers, and about how the mobile industry is fundamentally changing.

Something we’ve been talking about - and more importantly, doing - for more than a few years now.

Let’s talk specifically about GTIP. GTIP is a premium SMS-based content service that relies on both the long tail and customer service. It always has. Unlike similar content services, the aim is not to sell the customer a single transient piece of content and hope they come back for another piece later (or trick or force them into a subscription to try and maximise revenues), the aim instead is to create a trust dialogue between the customer and the service provider. We want customers to come back of their own free will because we’re open, transparent and relevant, and because they trust us not to abuse the relationship.

And the results have been astounding: 75% takeup, at least 50% repeat business, long-term customer retention (in excess on 18 months in some cases) and a long-term established trusted relationship that goes beyond the initial customer use and impression of the service. After after more than three years of continuous operation (we were one of the first, if not the first live-response SMS question services to launch worldwide), we’re seeing customers return to the service they first used a couple of years ago, or following the service by switching to new keywords as old ones go out of service. (We even had customers who took the time to wish the staff a Merry Christmas by texting in.)

From a business point of view, it’s perhaps best explained as an example from the games industry:

Publisher A implements the GTIP service in their game manuals, using the same customer support keyword for each game. Over time, customers buy the game, and see the keyword. If they need help, they have the option of calling the publisher’s telephone support line, or texting in their query secure in the knowledge their question will be answered (if it can), at a known, fixed cost. And every time a customer uses the text service, the publisher earns a few pennies without any additional support effort.

Once the customer tires of the game, she trades it in, and another customer buys the game. This new customer sees the text service, asks a question, and the publisher makes a few pennies. What’s different this time around is that the publisher is making money from the game after it enters the secondhand market.

Taking this example to another vertical market: The rental market. If Publisher A sells a game into the rental market (for example through Blockbuster), then they lose out on a number of potential sales (and the revenue associated). However, by implementing the GTIP service, which is title and platform agnostic, the publisher can earn incremental revenues from games in the rental market as well, just from people who have rented the game also using the support service.

By making use of the same keyword for every game, the Publisher can also associate the keyword support service with the concept of general customer support, leading customers of Publisher A to associate the sevrice with ‘game support’ not ’support for Publisher A’s games’. When this happens (and this has already happened), customers start using the service to ask questions about every game they play. So Publisher A starts earning revenues from another publisher’s game.

Of course there are other similar markets that remian untapped. Back in 2003 I wrote an article about missed mobile opportunites aorund mobile devices and online gaming. I’m still yet to see this particular area properly addressed - something I attribute to a tunnel vision in both the Mobile and Games industry.

Also in 2003, I first talked about the untapped potential of SMS. This was also where I first talked about GTIP and the potential of such services. I also talked about campaigns and marketing techniques that are only now being ‘discovered’ by more mainstream marketing agencies, such as using an advertised keyword (number 10) to allow customers to request product information be sent based on their postcode:

Let’s use an example (not one we are currently working on, this is a hypothetical):
Say you manufacture high-value electrical goods for resale through high-street retailers. As a manufacturer you advertise your products as you want people to purchase them. You may undertake some cross-advertising where you identify where you can purchase these goods.

How about if you used SMS to tell people where the nearest place they could buy your goods was? The beauty of using an SMS shortcode (with our without a keyword) is that you only need advertise one thing. An obvious use is geolocation, where the customer sends their postcode to the SMS shortcode, and receives an SMS giving them the location of the nearest store that stocks the item they are interested in. The basic implementation of this is simple as it’s a straight automation question.

However if you tie this in with a customer support service, your customers need only ever remember the shortcode if they need help with the product they have just bought. They can use the shortcode to get help, assistance, advice – and the location of their nearest repair centre.

And a recent campaign from Ubisoft allowed customers to text to a UK shortcode to get a video from the new Prince of Persia game, a service we’ve been actively trying to get off the ground with games publishers since 2002 (ironically we approached Ubisoft about providing this service in 2002, 2003 and 2004), without much luck.

The one overriding theme we have tried to carry through our early days in providing mobile content services is that eveyrthing we do should be aimed at answering the needs of the customer. Hence long derived large revenues from data charging and low payout rates for premium services. As such there’s been a real emphasis on selling as much content as quickly as possible, rather than providing a long-term customer-centric service.