CHAPTER 4 CASE STUDIES
4.2 Telecommunication Industry
4.2.2 Company F
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4.2.2 Company F IT capability
IT-background senior manager
The IT-background senior manger plays the important on facilitate the new service innovation development. The strong support smoothed the development process and gave more authority in the organization to facilitate the structure change for the introduction of new innovations. For example, the VP of operating department actively expands the more technology-based service oriented department which concentrates on the research and development of new value-added services. This organization change helps to form the IT department with specialization and focus on new IT enabled service innovation development and related investment.
Complementary Resource
Customer Relationship Management
In 2003, Company B constructed the integrated CRM platform aimed to provide the integration of the back –end CRM and front –end service campaign platform. This system has made the customers’ profiles and data more easily accessible and analyzable at all levels of business. For example, in the customer support department, the front line call center can make up sales to the customers by information recommended by the pop up from the system’s analysis result of the customers’ profile. In another case, the manager in the customer relationship management department can make a decision about this information and come up with new initiatives and marketing campaigns. With the well-supported CRM staff and CRM system, Company F could be efficient and accurate in customers’ needs discovery and new innovation idea generalization.
IT-enabled Service Innovations App Platform
In March 2010, the company launched the application platform called “Match Market”.
Although it is the latest entrant into this market, it has unique features that others do not have. One is the high compatibility for mobile operation systems including the blackberry, which is not supported by the competitors’ platform. However, they still keep it as an exclusive service only to their subscribers. The consideration is that they want to focus on the service improvement for their customers at this stage. Initially they offered the exclusive development of practical, small tools and news applications, including match stock market, match news, etc., while Android has selected more than 100 entertainments, financial, social media and other free software, aimed to meet the smart phone for business users, and attracted younger, female, non-business people and other ethnic groups.
As the vice chief operator of personal business unit expressed, the motivation for developing such mobile application platform is:
“It will be the outbreak of the mobile phone Internet in 2010. Since our company had a deep
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understanding of the local telecommunications Taiwanese Mobile user needs, we carefully plan to introduce match Market, which not only gives customers the most useful mobile phone software, but also provides for the software developers a complete software up- and download mechanism to create the best mobile internet user experience.”
To differentiate their services from others, they emphasized the "localization" services, such as the Chinese user interface and software of use assessment, charging directly into the telecommunications bill which is not limited to the credit card payment. They also stressed that they had a very close cooperation with the program developers by offering completely mobile testing services and do not ask for exclusive contracts. Besides that, they have continued to make self-development software and thus do not worry about the source of the software. Further, Company E is not only committed to designing the best interface for users to browse, but to providing a complete software management, authentication, charging mechanism and sales channel for the developers, so that partners can easily get started with sales management software.
Location Based Services
The development of the GPS application stems from cooperation with Garmin, which has long focused on the GPS application. They launch the services that provided guiding and navigation with built-in GPS mobile phone or an external GPS receiver. They also offered the added service called
"WaDiJa" primarily for personal location information retrieval. At that time it was the first one that combination of the LBS and mobile positioning function of mobile multiplayer games and mobile phone card battle game provided by their exclusive contracted partner. In this way, mobile users can easily learn their current location and use the terminal near the check or receive information of various places, and at the same time it can locate a specific user or organization, the location of the user real-time monitoring and tracking, combined with the electronic map, Implementation Monitoring and Scheduling. The A-GPS with cellular network-based station positioning difference between the two is to be defined for the location coordinates from different providers, i.e. different location technology.
E-book
Company F launched the "mobile Bookstore" providing users the "Action Book City" download reader, which can be used for reading the content such as novels and comics. Especially, this is also the most compatible with mobile systems including Java, Android and BlackBerry. They built the e-book content management platform providing the software viewing and digital rights management through encryption, and other mechanisms to protect the content, with the aim to improve user loyalty, satisfaction or to attract more new customers. Since they launched the service in 2008, it has generated download of 1000 thousand each month, and thousands of books have been provided in on-line bookstore, for more than 400 varieties of mobile phone models.
Mobile TV
They cooperated with one of the companies in the group enterprise to provide the mobile
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shopping service called MOMO TV shopping channel based upon the existing service “TV watching everywhere”. The result came beyond their expectation such that there have been more than 1,000 calls through the use of such mobile shopping service.
They adopted the “Vidiator” streaming video platform which has been adopted by more than 20 telecommunication operators in other countries, and which has provided dynamic adjustment of video quality with an exclusive technology. This feature provided customers with different audio and video quality and transmission speed, and has allowed users to watch videos in the process of bandwidth such that in the case of lack of base station, the film will not be interrupted, and you can still watch the lower quality, be restored bandwidth, and picture quality can be restored to normal levels.
In 2009, Company F announced a stock repurchase in cash over 440 million, equivalent to the amount of 382 billion NT dollars buying Carlyle Group's Taiwan Kai Bo cable system. After this acquisition, plus the original Taiwan Tai Geda solid media (the former Fu-yang Co.), they obtained 32% market share in one fell swoop, to become Taiwan's first large-scale systems television operator, almost equal to the legal limit (33%). This action showed the huge ambition and resolution for entering the content service industry such as multimedia stream, entertainment video, TV shows and so on. In the battle of digital television services, the most important thing is to grasp the last mile, that is, by household services providing direct access. By acquiring the existing service providers, we not only obtain the market share, but a bunch of technology resources such as IT infrastructure, IT workers, and the know-how in the media content domain. Although the cable TV system conversion from the traditional format brings about huge amount of investment, they are optimistic about future opportunities in digital TV value-added service.
NFC payment
A three-month-long "Mobile PayPass prerelease experience plan by Company F, their associated business (Bank) and Master Card Company was conducted in May, 2007. In this pilot program, they invited 100 users who had used the built-in Mobile PayPass payment functionality. Customers can used this payment tool for a number of vendors such theaters and directly managed stores. Besides, they can download the E-Coupon via the NFC mobile phone. Different from other competitors, the special feature is that it can replace their NFC mobile phone while Company D’s can’t. These have largely differentiated the services from others and have become the most reusable NFC application.
Indeed, Company E conducted the survey of usage after the program and found that more than three-quarters of interviewees believed the NFC mobile phone outperformed all other traditional credit cards. Consequently, they will continuously launch different initiatives and programs which offer different applications as the system is ready to complete
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4.2.3 Company G