Intelligent Interactions

SNAPin Software lets operators interact with their subscribers in real-time and in the context of their current mobile behaviour. The companys handset-based SelfService product suite enables the delivery of interactive promotions, the resolution of many customer support problems, and allows operators to deliver a branded service experience to their subscribers. David Murphy spoke to SNAPin Vice President, Products and Support, Tom Trinneer, to find out more

DM: As ever Tom, can we start with a bit of background on the company please?

TT: Sure. The company was formed in 2003 by serial entrepreneur Brian Roundtree. Brian has been working with the same core development team for the last eight years writing software for mobile devices.
The first 18 months were spent building the core technology, with funding from an Angel investor. We raised our first round of financing in December 2004, and by that time, we had a trial product. We started commercial trials with operators in western Europe in 2005. The next stage after that was a series of pilots with real customers. These have ranged from a few hundred to low thousands, to the one we did with Orange in the UK last summer, which involved 10,000 people. We have another planned in Spain which could be as high as 300,000. We have also secured a commercial, multi-year contract with a US carrier, and the first handset will ship nationwide in a few weeks.
Weve had three rounds of financing and raised $24.3 million (12 million) to date, and we have offices in Richmond and our headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.

DM: So tell us exactly what your software does and how it works?

TT: SNAPin helps the carrier save money in one of their most critical and expensive areas, customer care, and we also help them make money from advanced services on their data network. These are two of the biggest topics for carriers: how are we managing the cost of operating the network? And how are we doing on generating data revenues, and in particular, non-messaging data revenues?

DM: So how do you bring those two worlds together?

TT: The technology is a piece of client software that runs in the native OS of the handset. It usually ships on the handset, its written in C++ and it exposes a scripting layer which executes the application, and all the subscriber sees and experiences is one of these applications, and they are published and updated over-the-air (OTA) as often as the operator wants.
Applications are published OTA through our server running in the carriers network, and all the applications appear in the operators brand, in the subscribers preferred language, written in the tone of messaging that is appropriate to them.
The toolkit for developing these applications is highly configurable, which appeals to the large carrier groups, because it enables them to deliver their brand experience in a segmented way to their subscribers. This technology forms the foundation for our three products.

DM: And what are they?

TT: Our first product, SelfService Campaign, delivers interactive promotions and targeted offers. Each one of these applications starts based on contextual behaviour. So with Orange, for example, when a subscriber received more than three calls in a week from the same phone number, a promotional message appeared in a bubble that said: "This person calls you a lot. Would you like to set a Calling Tune (ringback tone) for them?"
They were very pleased with the results for that promotion, and when we did something similar with a photography promotion, they said it was the best adoption rate and conversion rate of any mobile promotion they had ever done. Here, the promotion occurred when the customer had taken a photo, to ask if they wanted to store it in the Orange Photo Album. And this is the key point: the promotion is initiated when it is of most interest to the subscriber

DM: So what were the results?

TT: The photo service generated up to 24 a year in additional revenue from participating customers, and they were thrilled with that. The Calling Tunes campaign achieved low double-digit percentage conversion, and they were thrilled with that too, because they had not seen that before.
The reason they were so successful is that the promotions were delivered just at the right time, which is the nirvana of all advertising and marketing: delivering the right message to the right user at the right time. It enables marketers to do that, to think about the target audience and the conditions that should exist to market to them successfully. I often ask the marketing people at the carriers to try to imagine that they could follow each of their customers around and then ask them, if they had one chance to whisper in their ear, when would that be, and this is usually a good way to tease it out of them.
SelfService Care solves three out of four care problems an individual subscriber might have, and those problems change over the lifetime of the relationship. The first week, its all about voicemail and temporary passwords and that sort of thing, and even though theres a card in the box to handle the answers to those questions, its been thrown away. So when the customer dials the number for the operator, our software responds to that event, so instead of the call going to the IVR system, the software intercepts the call and a greeting tells the subscriber to look at the phone to get the answer to the question they are probably going to ask.
Billing is another heavy area, when customers want to know how many minutes they have left this month. Or if they are pre-pay customers, whats their balance. This drives three or four calls out of every ten, so this information is presented in real-time on the screen. We make a connection to a self-care website or get a USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) code to get information out of the network to present in a graphically interesting, branded way, tying back into an opportunity to sell. Because when a customer care service solves the customers problem, gets the customer in a happy place, then theres an opportunity to upgrade the phone or to encourage them to start using a new service.
Once we get the billing information, including usage information, we might do an analysis of the number of texts they have sent since their last bill, and if it its more than two per day on average, we have a pop-up message that says: "You could save money with a text bundle" and this usually goes well with customers.

DM: So where are you now in terms of deployment?

TT: We are continuing to work with Orange. The operators tend to buy quite slowly. Were now doing a pilot deployment with SelfService Configure on Oranges Signature Series phones. These are customised, Orange-branded handsets, with special software. Lots of operators are keen on this idea, because they want to deliver a unique differentiated experience that is better than the same phone on another network. So they call the handset maker and say they want special features, and the handset maker agrees, but only on condition that they take at least a million. So this sort of thing is only available to large operators.
The problem with that is that if you are an operator selling a phone, you can start selling it today. But if I am Orange and I want to put it in the Signature Series, then I have to wait six to eight weeks for the phone to show up, while the other operator is selling out, so we are now using an expanded memory SIM card, sometimes called a MegaSIM or Sim+ card, with 128, 256 or 512MB of extra memory, which can be secured. So on the SIM card you put all the bits that make a Signature Series phone a Signature Series phone. So in the shop, the sales person puts the SIM in, and within three minutes, the generic handset turns into a Signature Series handset, and delivers the customised Orange software, with the Orange home screen, the ringers, wallpapers and video players. This all happens in three minutes, and its going on in shops in the UK right now.