A Cure for Bill Shock

by John Giere, SVP Products and Marketing

The term Bill Shock describes the shock mobile subscribers experience when their monthly bill is unexpectedly high. Leading causes of bill shock are roaming charges, talking or surfing the web (data roaming) in areas beyond your service coverage. Bill shock usually results in heated customer service calls, strongly worded emails, and ultimately customer churn. The scarier part as the old saying goes is: you ain't seen nothing yet. Increased data roaming in the form of video usage will take this bill shock to a new order of magnitude.

Although this isn't a new news story, the problem and the related negative Public Relations hit is becoming more pervasive in number and more prominent in the headlines. Consumer rights groups around the world are taking up the cause. In turn, this has spurred government regulators to take action. In Europe, bill shock from data roaming is so common that the EU has enacted a rule that requires wireless carriers to cut off service when their subscribers' bills reach a certain threshold. According to the BBC News, the new EU roaming regulation states that carriers must warn users when their bill hits 80% of the limit. Users have until July 1 to tell their carrier what their limit will be. If they don't, it will automatically be set at 50 euros ($65; £45).

While it is always nice to see new rules protecting the consumer, one warning and then stopping service strikes me as a rather clumsy solution to a delicate problem. What if the subscriber is in the middle of a crucial transaction or communication when their limit is reached?

Openwave today offers a much more flexible and dynamic solution to service providers looking to prevent churn-inducing bill shock. Openwave Passport is a notification and recommendation solution that not only informs users when they are close to their roaming limit (or pre-pay limit, or premium service limit, etc.), but it can offer any number of time- or volume-based extensions.

Passport provides the ideal way for service providers to keep their customers informed about their service limits and then give them the choice on how to proceed. These "passes" whether for roaming service, premium web services, or just simple pre-pay access, come at just the right time. They give the subscriber a range of options when they need them, and the service provider opens incremental revenue streams without ill-timed promotions.

Passport is part of Openwave's Traffic Mediation family of products all of which benefit from analytics-fueled context awareness so that every subscriber can be offered just what he or she needs to prevent bill shock and keep their service uninterrupted.