When planning your mobile launch, there’s an essential ingredient for your success – your MVNE vendor. You may have a clear business model, a plan and a well-defined target market, but you’ll be unlikely to meet your goals if you can’t deliver the service, account for it and tune it. With plenty of options to choose from, what do you need to look for in an MVNE vendor? In this post, we’ll explore some prerequisites – which could mean the difference between the success and failure of your mobile brand.
Can your MVNE vendor help you fit your market?
So, where do you start? Well, market fit is as good a place as any. Can your MVNE vendor enable you to craft a custom service offer that suits your brand proposition, and which enables you to deliver your chosen solutions? With so many different variables, this can be complex, so your MVNE vendor should be able to offer a way to accomplish this, so that you have full control over your offer.
It doesn’t matter if you are choosing to compete on price, or by other means, the simple fact is that you must be able to launch an offer that is differentiated from your competitors. It must be tailored to your chosen audience, from the very beginning. However, this process doesn’t end with the launch of the service, which brings us to market evolution.
Can you adapt and change as your market evolves?
Entering the market is one thing, but staying ahead of agile competitors and other new entrants is quite another. Put simply, you cannot rest on your laurels. Instead, you have to constantly think about tuning your offer, turning market signals and feedback into refining your offer and adapting it to ensure that it stays ahead – and retains critical competitive differentiation. And, you have to be able to get those new offers to market quickly.
This means that you must have the ability to control and modify your services, while extending the portfolio. You must also be able to rapidly build and communicate offers to your customer base, across all digital channels. But, creating and communicating offers, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. Your MVNE vendor should be able to help you to learn from the behaviour and habits of your customers, creating rich feedback, so that you can continually optimise and tune service portfolios to meet and anticipate demand. Of course, that demands two other factors – real-time business intelligence and multi-channel engagement.
Can your MVNE vendor help you understand your customers and ensure effective engagement?
There are numerous ways in which you can understand customer behaviour – but far too many to process manually. Automation is essential, combining real-time data with online and offline sources to ensure that continuous record of customer insights is processed and presented, optimised for your KPIs. This requires Business Intelligence tools, so that you can benefit from this stream of data and filter it so that you know what’s happening and make predictions about future events, measuring your success at every step.
But, you also need to be able to communicate effectively with customers, so that you can both respond to their comments, feedback and requests, while generating new communication to inform, promote and respond to the insights presented by the business intelligence tools provided by your MVNE vendor. Of course, this is about optimising and enhancing your business – but what about getting the basics right?
Does your MVNE vendor deliver all key operational processes?
Your MVNO story depends on smart technology, but it also depends on some pretty fundamental processes. You must be able to add new customers easily, distribute any required terminals and SIMs, provision remote SIMs, account for any transactions and bill and collect money. There are many critical processes that ensure that your MVNO operations can run smoothly and, crucially, with the minimum effort, ensuring that you can maintain a lean, focused organisation.
So, does your MVNE vendor enable you to do this, automating key tasks and offering a comprehensive solution to support your business proposition, while enabling you to collect revenue, securely and efficiently? And, if it can, does it give you the capacity to grow to match the success of your business?
Can your MVNE vendor scale?
Having the platform to deliver attractive offers, to refine them based on real insights, to engage with your customers and to automate key back-office processes is indeed essential – but if you succeed, you need to be absolutely confident that you can grow to match demand. As a result, your MVNE vendor must be able to offer the capacity to enable elastic scalability.
That means being able to flex up, quickly – due to rapid surges in demand, not only for gross numbers of subscribers, but also for ebbs and flows of traffic, which can vary quite considerably. If your platform cannot offer an agile way to add capacity, when you need it. Your MVNE vendor must offer cloud scale, but from a secure, protected and dedicated environment, so that you can depend on resources to match your success.
Choosing your MVNE vendor partner
Of course, there are many more factors to consider, but those that contribute most directly to the success of your mobile venture are essential. The ability to support business propositions, agile evolution and business growth are what differentiates MVNE vendors. Getting the basics right is just that, the basics. To increase the chance of success and to help you truly thrive, you need more than a business plan and a billing platform.
Of course, you can’t do without them, but with intense competition, there’s no avoiding the fact that the MVNE vendor is not only a solution provider, but a partner that can make the difference between success and failure. Does your MVNE vendor deliver?
