Seamless service integration with APIs and intelligent marketing – creating a richer mobile offer for MVNOs

The traditional model for MVNO service innovation is simply to overlay multiple services with a common billing and customer care layer. In this case, the services are entirely separate, but the customer is presented with a single bill requiring a single payment, and customer service agents can view the range of services provided to each customer.

MVNOs must now look beyond this legacy model to develop and exploit new opportunities. A more adaptable approach is to enable the customer to turn specific features on and off, to add and remove individual services as required, as well as to subscribe to a baseline suite of bundled services.

Innovation is critical in the mobile business

Innovation is essential for MVNOs, as they strive to compete and gain market share and attention. Of course, there are numerous ways in which innovation can be achieved, as we explored in our recent “MVNO Innovation Briefings” series.

One valuable approach is to go beyond a basic offer and to enrich your service with complementary packages. Bundling and combining services can add value and increase relevance for your customers and chosen market segment. While this can be achieved by bundling different offers into a single package, with a single subscription, there are other ways to enhance value.

For example, introducing new offers to customers so that they can choose new features and services offers a wealth of innovation opportunities. That’s because, if you understand your customer, you can start to bring them offers that make sense to them. This tactic depends on building relationships with partners and then using business intelligence and clever campaigns to target different offers to different customers, based on profile, activity history and other criteria.

The trick is to find the key customer benefit that can be enabled by a particular combination of services and, where possible, to identify the advantage that can be gained from broader insight into customer preferences. As service-focused organisations, without the baggage that fixed and mobile telcos must carry, MVNOs are particularly well placed to select and exploit those opportunities. However, traditional approaches may achieve bundling, but the result can be different silos that are related but disconnected.

Integration creates a seamless, responsive experience

But, there’s another dimension. Customers increasingly expect lightening service, so manual activation and registration for a complementary product, while simple to achieve, is probably not the right way to do things. Instead, integration between the MVNO service suite and the partner platform via API can enable new levels of responsiveness and integration.

APIs enable rapid combination of services and the interconnection of different platforms, so that they can benefit from shared capabilities and common resources. This is particularly important, because an MVNO can retain control of the customer data, avoiding the need for a subscriber to reregister, provide new billing details, and so on – while enabling access to the seamless service.

Rather than simply enabling an offer, bringing new services together into a more cohesive, integrated framework provides a more compelling and attractive solution. When combined with intelligent marketing and a deeper understanding of customer interests, habits and behaviour, MVNOs can identify innovation opportunities and ensure they are targeted effectively.

So, what you need is the ability to perform this connection, backed with the ability to mine data and to pinpoint value opportunities. Developing your capabilities so that you can identify such innovation opportunities and then deliver them means having the right framework and platform.

Of course, there’s much more. MVNOs need to deliver this seamless experience as they add value to their core offers or bring to market unique combinations of services, building on the principles of a single account and billing relationship. And, with 5G coming, there’ll be massively increased potential for combining capabilities and services, to deliver personalised experiences.

Explore innovation opportunities for MVNOs in our exclusive briefing series

Why not explore the world of MVNO innovation in our exclusive briefing series? Download our guides today and then talk with our team to see how you can enable new innovation for your mobile business.