NetCom: A Decade and a Half of Success and Consistent Growth
The second largest mobile phone operator in Norway, NetCom was founded in 1993, and has worked closely with Comverse as a solution partner virtually since Day One - a fruitful and productive relationship that spans a decade and a half of consistent growth.
Owned by the Swedish company TeliaSonera, NetCom currently has approximately 2.3 million subscribers, including service providers and MVNOs operating in NetCom’s network.
The Need: To Reposition Voicemail to Increase Voice and Data ARPU and Improve the Day-to-Day User Experience
Well aware of the significance of the fact that voice-related revenue accounts for more than 80% of the revenue generated by mobile operators
1, NetCom views it as mission-critical to maximize voice revenues - especially with voice revenue dominance projected far into the foreseeable future.
On the average, only about 70% of call attempts are successfully completed, while the remaining 30% are not
2. While these figures vary from operator to operator, one fact is consistent: very many call attempts are not completed, and this represents a significant loss of revenue to the operator.
Netcom sought a suite of call completion services that could significantly increase voice revenue by steering failed call attempts to successful completion as billable voice traffic, thereby increasing the flow of information about calls and callers, which generates new traffic.
Moreover, NetCom aspired to increase user satisfaction through improved communications and ease of use.
The Challenge: To Implement a Total Voicemail and Call Completion Strategy Supporting a Variety of Call Completion Services
NetCom identified a need to establish a Total Call Completion suite – a comprehensive set of well-integrated call completion services that enable operators to maximize revenue potential from all unsuccessful call attempts, and at the same time optimize the overall user experience.
NetCom’s goal was wide-ranging - to select services with a solid business case, and then deploy them in a way that enables synergetic implementation of additional advanced Call Completion services in the future.
The Solution: Comverse Who Called and Visual Voicemail via MMS - Powered by the InSight™ Next-Generation Open Services Environment
NetCom solved the challenge by supplementing its existing voicemail service with two related Comverse solutions: Who Called and Visual Voicemail via MMS, both over the InSight Next-Generation Open Services Environment:
- Who Called: Delivers information that the handset does not report about missed calls. It ensures that the called party never misses the opportunity to know about all calls missed while unreachable (handset off, out of battery or out of service range). As soon as the called party becomes reachable, an information-rich SMS notification reports who called them and when, enabling to call back with a single click.
- Visual Voicemail via MMS: Pushes messages immediately to a user’s MMS-enabled device with immediate click-to-access to the messages, increasing immediacy and relevancy. The message can be enhanced with multimedia elements.
Together with Voicemail, Who Called and Visual Voicemail via MMS give NetCom an effective and synergistic solution to the issue of formerly lost calls.
Why Selected: Deriving Full Benefit from a Full Solution Partner
Key reasons why NetCom chose Comverse solutions include:
- Market Leaders in Voicemail and Visual Voicemail: Comverse global expertise and leadership span more than two decades.
- Complete Suite of Services: Comverse’s Total Call Completion suite is a mass-market solution with a comprehensive set of complementing and well-integrated services.
- Time to Market: Powered by the InSight Open Services Environment at NetCom, Comverse Total Call Completion is cost-effective to deploy, with quick time to market.
- Superior User Experience: Comverse Total Call Completion is engineered to provide a superior user experience that boosts usage and user satisfaction for voicemail subscribers and non-subscribers.
- Long History of Fruitful Cooperation: The successful relationship between Comverse and NetCom has deep roots that go back nearly 15 years.
- Global Presence / Local Support: Comverse Call Completion services are in daily use by more than a billion people in every region of the world, yet Comverse works closely with NetCom as a full solution partner - pre-launch and post-launch - to optimize success.
Who Called Results: Dramatic Usage Increase
Addressing the needs and preferences of voicemail subscribers and non-subscribers alike, Comverse solutions generate significant new revenues for NetCom.
Kennet Nomeland, Senior Engineer for NetCom Norway, cites the example of Who Called, part of the Total Call Completion Suite. Who Called at Netcom ”transforms an average of 20-23% of slamdowns that formerly would have been lost to the network into callbacks and SMS messages to the A (original initiating) party, resulting in significant new airtime usage, so the business case is very solid.”
SMS Messages and Return Calls Generated by Who Called
The statistics depicted in the graph above are conservative, as they reflect only text and voice callbacks initiated through the service within 60 minutes of receipt of the Who Called notification. The average length of return calls was about three minutes, contributing significantly to airtime usage revenues.
Launched as a free service for the entire network, Who Called has won praise as an extremely simple service to use. The only thing required from the user is to read the SMS, so virtually all users can make frequent use of this service. Adding to the user friendliness, the name of a caller appears in the notification when that caller is in the address book.
NetCom derives additional value from Who Called by making the popular service available to the virtual operators who rent capacity in NetCom’s network.
“One of NetCom’s wisest decisions was to go with InSight,” Nomeland said. “It is a very stable platform that delivers nearly 100% uptime. We are very satisfied with the quality delivered by Comverse.”
“One of the best things about Comverse is its local support,” he continued. ”We benefit greatly from having a local office, which has brilliant people working there. Comverse is very pro-active with suggestions and analyzing the market, and they are very professional in the way they handle their projects and support.”
Looking Forward: Total Visual Voicemail and Call Completion Suite
Following the success of Who Called and Visual Voicemail via MMS, NetCom decided to target more revenue growth by launching additional Call Completion services to both the voicemail and non-Voicemail segments.
Leveraging the existing Who Called infrastructure, NetCom plans to further address the broadest range of user needs with Comverse Multimedia Call Completion.
Recognizing the incomparable value of a truly comprehensive approach to call completion, NetCom is acting decisively and with vision to fully address the needs and preferences of the Voicemail and non-Voicemail segments alike.
The results speak for themselves.
For more information about NetCom see their website at www.netcom.no
1 Taken from data compiled by Comverse from several operators
2 Ibid
