The cryptic title for this post is a summary of the consensus coming out of Monday’s Device Management Forum in London. At the conference in London, I delivered a presentation together with Blyk, one of our clients. We shared with the audience our lessons learned in how to increase the OTA success rate up to 100%, which in fact is a requirement for Blyk. Their members must have internet and MMS working on a mobile phone to be able to receive these multimedia advertisements (see example) and get free texting and minutes in return. It makes the Blyk lessons learned unique, in a sense that they have really tuned the over-the-air (OTA) settings provisioning systems to the max. The remaining 40% of unsuccessful settings deliveries is caused by end-user confusion and handset issues (e.g. “settings memory full!”). Issues that can be resolved only manually by the end-user, which is where our self service product comes in. Achieving a success rate of only 60% is of course pretty disappointing. And this is best-in-class according to the industry players gathered at the conference. Here’s our Top 10 challenges for providers to get the settings right. To resolve these problems structurally, handset vendors and mobile providers need to work much more closely on standards. But in fact, there have been Open Mobile Alliance committees talking about this already for quite some time… Alternatively, I could imagine a “gorilla” like Google comes with a quicker fix, packaged within their growing list of mobile internet initiatives.
If you are interested in a copy of the Blyk-Qelp presentation (title “Mobile internet is not plug and play”), please send us a message using this form.