How Bango ensures mobile’s 3 billion pre-paid customers benefit from the OTT ecosystem
OTT subscription services are driving growth for major merchants and service providers. As new markets become available, technological innovations are ensuring that mobile’s 3 billion pre-paid customers can fully participate.
“Amazon has doubled its Prime subscriber base in India in the last 18 months, with a record number of new customers joining the subscription programme in the last 12 months”, Prime’s India head Ashkay Sahi told Indian Express in a recent interview.
“According to industry executives, Amazon’s growth in its Prime user base is also attributed to partnerships it has inked with telecom and cable service operators who offer the annual subscription to users for free”, reported Times of India.
During the first half of 2019, the Bango Platform opened-up subscription services in markets including India, Philippines, Singapore and UAE. As a result, now 2 billion subscribers have the opportunity to enjoy leading subscription services for music, movies and other content through special offers – or bundles – provided by their mobile operators, cable carriers and other service providers.
But, when the biggest slice of the population is financially limited, how do you avoid customers having to repeatedly cancel and sign-up?
For customers to enjoy full access to the most popular OTT services (think Amazon Prime, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify), through mobile operator bundled offers, the customer needs to commit to a monthly mobile top-up. And this, for billions of prospective customers across India, SE Asia, Latin America, and Africa, is a challenge to the OTT providers and their MNO partners who bundle these offers. A customer that subscribes to a special offer may not have the funds in their pre-paid account to make the required top-up payments on schedule. Which would normally trigger the OTT subscription offer to be revoked.
To stop the potential loss of hundreds of millions of customers in this way, Bango has developed technology called “Suspend and Resume”. This feature gives the OTT provider and MNO partner total control over the customer’s engagement with their service, so they can manage access dynamically based on their customers behaviors.
Suspend and Resume can be activated to stop a missing top-up payment from automatically cancelling the customers service. Instead, the MNO, or the OTT provider, can suspend the customer’s premium access to the service, and instantly resume it once the customer has successfully topped-up. Nothing is lost as a result of the suspension, the customer drops right back into their active service package. The customer does not need to request the service again, or navigate through another service activation flow.
Both service provider and operator want to acquire and retain as many new customers as possible. Bango technology provides the “glue” that enables them to deliver these services through a standardized offer, customer engagement and management mod