In their latest report on telecoms loyalty, "Telecoms Loyalty: Global best practice to attract and retain loyal and delighted customers" (Informa Telecoms, 2010), the author Julio Puschel says on the topic of Loyalty: 

"The challenge is to not only turn strangers into true friends, but also find the right investment/profitability balance within each different segment." 

The report goes on to say that the operators they surveyed value the increased profitability that goes along with longer-lasting subscriber relationships.  In fact, when the operators were asked about the main strategy they used to increase customer life-time value, the top answer was to focus on keeping their subscribers for longer periods.  In other words, retention strategy was seen as being the most important thing, even more important than subscriber acquisition.

Of course there are regions where we might expect acquisition to still be the top, or only, priority.  Redknee sees this in many of the markets we work in.  But given the growing maturity of the global telecoms markets, a shift to retention isn't surprising.  The next question is how do you keep those subscribers around for as long as possible, and which subscribers should you put the most effort into keeping? 

Humera Malik, Redknee's Director of Marketing, spoke with Susana Schwartz of Connected Planet Online about this topic and how tiered pricing fits into it, this week.

In the article, Ms. Malik asks “How many subscribers do you have at launch? Who are your low-, medium- and high-value customers? Who may churn? How can you convince them not to churn? How can you increase ARPU for specific users? How can you convert your medium subs to high? And how can you get high-value customers to expand on what they do with you?” 

See the full article on the Connected Planet Online site for more about how both operators and subscribers will need to change the way they understand one another (starting with making sense of pricing) so that subscribers can get what they need without any nasty surprises, and operators can profit from a natural loyalty that builds out of these longer-lasting subscriber relationships.