recruiting without spending a dollar on marketing," says Byrne. She adds that her team looked at the success 3 UK has had with Skype and figured customers would value the service and that it would give more of them a reason to adopt a Smartphone and subscribe to data plans.
The relationship was conceived at CTIA Wireless 2009 and launched less than a year later. This is remarkable for a large carrier on many levels. VZW was first to market with this offering and moved from concept to production very rapidly given the scope and uniqueness of the offering. It embraced a disruptive technology as a value-add, and didn't try to shut it down as a competitor. What's more, Skype calling will cut into VZW's international long distance business, especially given that large enterprises have been looking at solutions like Skype to attack their international calling expenses.
To the nitpicker, that's not 100 percent seamless, but it is customer-centric.
What's not happening in this arrangement – at least not yet – is the ability to buy Skype credit or calling plans directly through the handset app, or to have such purchases billed on a subscriber's monthly VZW invoice. However, something tells me (not Byrne) that these capabilities will be available in an upcoming release, which will be yet another step in the 4G service model direction for the Verizon Wireless-Skype partnership.
Another important nuance is that a call made via Skype to a phone number, and not to a Skype client, will be subject to the normal rules that govern data and minutes usage. However, the VZW customer's device will present an alert to warn customers about this
Byrne's team looked at the equation on this point and found "there might be a reduction in ILD, but the trade off is the positive experience. You could make these calls easier and it's more attractive to business customers and consumers. It's a shift in thinking and we felt it was positive for VZW to move in this direction." In the past, an idea like this would have been shot down because of resistance from the business owners whose P&L statements benefitted from growing ILD revenue. In this case, VZW's executive leadership looked at the big picture, realized it was likely to move some numbers from the ILD column to the data column, and pulled the trigger on the deal because it's likely to drive customer acquisition and retention. That's the kind of "holistic" thinking the BSS sector has been nagging carriers to adopt for years, so VZW deserves credit for actually doing it.
and remind them that if, for example, they're calling another VZW phone, that's a free, in-network call better made without the Skype app. To the nitpicker, that's not 100 percent seamless, but it is customer-centric (another buzzword!) and is very similar to the kind of advice-of-charge (okay, it's a buzzword drinking game now) the BSS sector has also been recommending for years.
Down the Path
As VZW brings more of this sort of functionality to market, it's blazing a path to the 4G future for which we've all been asking. If GM had adopted this kind of thinking, we might have our flying cars by now too. In all seriousness, it is refreshing to see an incumbent carrier looking at the online and social media markets to see what it can learn and adopt. A million trendy concepts
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 11
