Chapter 5 | Building your revenue supercharger
The idea behind Messaging Revenue Optimisation is simple – the application somewhat harder – yet delivering this strategy is something do-able by every MNO we work with.
At its core it combines two key elements – Revenue Defence and Revenue Creation – coupled with the human expertise needed to monitor the traffic data, analyse it, action the insights generated, and deliver the two programs.
The core themes being:
- Maximise and grow the total addressable revenue MNO’s could be generating from the SMS A2P traffic on their network, as well as adding in new services and processes to enable additional revenue to be created and the channel future-proofed.
- Lockdown the network with a next generation firewall – ensure you can categorise all the messaging traffic utilising your radio spectrum, in real time, and in doing so, offer advanced fraud and spam protection to your customers (and by extension the brands wanting to communicate with them).
So, what do we mean by ‘total addressable revenue’? Well, as we mentioned above, MNO’s looking to maximise revenue from their A2P SMS traffic typically have two options. They either do more fixed price deals – usually with aggregators – where operators offer wholesale access to their network to utilise redundant capacity. Or, they look at jacking up prices – which again as we’ve highlighted, frequently causes grey traffic problems.
However when we were designing HAUD’s Messaging Revenue Optimisation program, one of the first sets of analysis we did was to look at why MNO’s have such poor choices around revenue growth in terms of new income streams from A2P. Where were the pinch points, and what solutions could we develop to remove these obstacles.
Turns out much of the dilemma for MNO’s stems from a lack of granular operational control.
For example, because of the high volumes of traffic, and the plethora of brands wanting to engage with individual operators to send A2P, coupled with less flexible software / customer management tools, operators instead turned to wholesale and farmed out this communication channel’s value.
So, we built solutions to address this farming-out requirement, and enable a simple, clear, largely automated customer management experience for the MNO’s and their clients – whether aggregators or enterprise – where individual requirements can be more closely tailored for.
And, because these solutions start with the deployment of a next generation firewall, it also means the MNO can help safeguard both those client models too – by helping protect trusted aggregator partners against loss of business to grey routes, and delivering high chanel integrity for enterprises who manages part of their business through A2P:
Technological solutions negate the lack of granular control, widening the funnel with positive jaw recurring revenue streams.
Quick Task
The first question we posed was on how much traffic you as an MNO currently use to drive your pricing strategy? The second question is this: Have you worked with your firewall provider (or in-house team) to deliver real-time SMS categorisation data? Having this insight, knowing what messages are being sent, by whom, to who, from where – is the foundation for you to structure your pricing and drive up usage while maximising revenue.
However, we also need to take a look at the fixed price model too when discussing next-gen firewall deployment.
Current fixed price models are designed for ease only. They offer little to no flexibility in contracts or pricing models. An upfront payment is the only revenue return aggregators can offer.
In return they get the keys to the network door and are asked no questions which encourages them to mix routing while MNOs are left blind to the opportunities they have on their networks.
Next generation firewalls solve this conundrum – plus many others.
Next Chapter
Messaging Revenue Optimisation is built on the foundations of subscriber, brand and revenue security. In the next chapter we look at how to combine these to become revenue defenders.
Want To find out more?
Speak with one of our messaging revenue specialists