Olista, has released a report on key issues encountered by mobile users in accessing mobile content in the last quarter of 2007.
The findings are based on statistical information gleaned from monitoring over eleven million mobile users across five different mobile operators using Olista’s SAM platform, and hundreds of millions of usage events. The overall findings indicate that usability rather than price is negatively impacting user adoption of new mobile data services.
One key finding revealed that over 60% of video and music downloads are being made Off-Portal, graphically illustrating the issue facing operators in hooking users on their own content offerings. Other findings which similarly point to usage difficulties included the fact that 30% of users downloaded the same content over and over again such as the same music track. Yet more alarming statistics revealed that 85% of mobile TV users abandoned the service after the first viewing and after passing through the advice of notice charge without hesitation. The indication from the Olista findings being that the user was experiencing navigational difficulties in moving from one TV channel to the next.
Another important revelation from the survey was that over 70% of users who sign up to content bundles failed to consume any mobile content, indicating that price was not a factor for these users and the barriers to usage were more likely to be associated with ease-of-use or technical problems.
Another worrying statistic for operators and content providers showed that around 50% of all application downloads failed to complete successfully. According to Oren Glanz, CEO of Olista, “The industry needs a wake-up-call to address and act on these issues. Unless operators are accurately apprised of the issues experienced by their users they will never succeed in generating significant mobile data revenues, no matter how many attractive new marketing offers and services they launch. The key to unlocking the pent up demand for mobile content lies in understanding and addressing these barriers to adoption.”
OlistaSAM allows the operator to understand the usage issues in real time so that the operator can automate and fix them before users become disillusioned and abandon the service. The information provided by the service enables the operator to determine the appropriate customer response, for example to send them an SMS text message or training video to help them to successfully navigate the Web Portal, or to get a customer support representative to call them help them resolve a configuration issue. The service can also be used to identify revenue generation opportunities to help target users for new services as well as proactively track response to marketing campaigns.