According to a recent report by Juniper Research, a provider of research and analytical services for service providers, the roaming market will be growing from USD57 billion this year to USD90 billion in 2018. The firm attributes the increase primarily to the surge in the use of mobile data, with data expected to contribute to more than a third of total roaming revenues for Mobile Operators.
These figures, which are in tandem with the overall growth in mobile services globally however, are dependent on a number of factors, says the firm, namely the anticipation of tariff reductions for roaming over the next few years and secondly, the fact that inbound and outbound travelers will continue turning on their data when they are on travel. This is where the 'silent roaming' phenomena comes into picture. For the fear of overages and ensuing bill shocks, many roamers prefer to use very minimal data or voice, sometimes nothing at all, as soon as they leave the country. Juniper says that the silent roaming phenomena, if it becomes more prevalent over the years, may impact Mobile Operators' revenues to a good extent, especially with the USD90 billion expected roaming dollars contributing to over 8% of Mobile Operators' revenue by 2018.
The rise of the 'silent roamer' could very well point to the mobile data usage patterns that have evolved over the last 24 months where more and more people are using data to access rich content namely video applications, voice and messaging applications including video messaging, mobile gaming apps and also to browse rich content on the internet. If data was once about accessing emails and reading top stories on a favourite online daily, today, data is all about watching a presentation online, video conferencing, downloading a rich report or whiling away some time on an online gaming app. With increasing speeds on data especially on 4G and LTE Advanced, many subscribers may barely notice how much more data they are consuming - and thanks to lower than ever data rates, especially in markets such as the US, their bigger shared data plans can now cover all their data needs across all their connected devices.
The scenario however, changes completely when consumers are roaming. For one, roaming packages are not part of their existing plans, and carry charges which are much higher, depending on the destination and inter-operator partnerships. Secondly, their content consumption habits cannot be auto-adjusted to accessing only very light content just because they are travelling. Most subscribers who use data will tend to continue watching videos, connecting to friends on social media and will be downloading and uploading rich content in the normal course of their work and personal communication. In combination, these two factors can easily lead to charges that far exceed what consumers are willing to pay. And for these reasons, it is not surprising that a larger number of subscribers may become very silent when they roam. The effect? Lost revenues, decreased satisfaction (not having data despite needing it) and potential churn. Churn in this scenario can happen when frequent travellers, despite enjoying great data plans at home, switch Mobile Operators to have access to better roaming plans. This puts a large number of Mobile Operators at risk. In a recent statement discussing mobile operators' roaming revenues, Syniverse, a global transaction processor for Mobile Operators, enterprises, ISPs and OTTs, shared a forecast from the Strategic Economic Engineering Corp (SEEC) which said that operators in the US, UK and Germany combined, stand to lose up to USD16 billion in revenues when consumers switch operators to benefit from better roaming offers.
So, what is the Mobile Operator's strategy to address this? For silent roamers, non-data roamers (people who use only voice while roaming) and for those who find their operator's roaming plans unfitting to their roaming needs, contextual roaming offers can very well be the answer. Contextual offers are already becoming a major tool for Mobile Operators to increase revenues, from being able to upsell their own services (such as data passes, content passes, digital offers etc) and from pushing promotional material on behalf of third parties, as part of their mobile advertisement business. According to Syniverse, SEEC's findings highlight the need for real-time roaming detection and roaming offer campaigns - which are part of intelligent roaming solutions - to bring to subscribers offers which provide assurance over their total data spend while roaming, whose charges are transparent, which are easy to subscribe and also unsubscribe, which are competitively priced and which allow as-needed consumption. Mary Clark, CMO of Syniverse, said in the company's statement, "Operators that stay focused and implement intelligent roaming solutions – such as real-time roaming detection, targeted offer campaign management, audience segmentation, discounting and data roaming sponsorship – are in a stronger position to retain subscribers, protect their domestic revenues and benefit from their share of the increasing roaming segment."
Intelligent roaming solutions leverage real-time inputs such as the destination country, the locality, the applications/mobile content the user is trying to access as well as real-time updates from local sources of information and merge these with the user's profile and subscription patterns including his/her data spending, roaming plan, content consumption preferences, personal information and other relevant data to deliver offers that are highly customized, that are relevant to the subscriber's circumstances and that are delivered exactly when the subscriber needs them. With the number of people who travel internationally increasing from year to year and coupled with the increasing dependence on data connectivity, the right plans to the right people will definitely boost Mobile Operators' roaming revenues while increasing the overall customer experience on their mobile data services.
