Providing Service Plans for Families and Children: Creating a Competitive Differentiator
Providing Service Plans for Families and Children: Creating a Competitive Differentiator
Operators can improve the adoption of their services and win new customers by developing service plans aimed at families that provide a personalized experience and meets parents’ concerns about childrens’ mobile usage. Recent research indicates that parents should be concerned about how children use their mobiles. Openet commissioned research with leading consumer research agency, Harris Interactive, to examine how teenagers use their mobile phones and the internet. The results found that cyberbullying and mis-use of mobiles is alarmingly high and existing parental rules about safe mobile phone usage are largely ineffective as there is little or no enforcement.
Join us to learn:
• The key research findings and extent of the problem of cyberbullying and mobile mis-use by children
• How operators can increase service adoption and win new customers by developing plans that provide controls for safe mobile usage by children and peace of mind for parents
• How to create a high value personalized service offering for parents by enabling them to control their children’s usage from their mobiles
Register for this webinar and receive a copy of the Harris Interactive research report, Mobile Communications Safety for Teenagers.
Tags; Archive, Openet, Parental controls, telecoms.com
Thank you for your questions. This Q&A is now closed. You can follow up with Martin direct by emailing martin.morgan@openet.com.
Has there been any research into how a child reacts to being subjected to parental controls? Any insights for the best way to message them in all of this?
How interesting is this control features for teenagers? Is it not viewed as an invasion of privacy
Hello
Yes – most kids don’t mind too much. The research showed that most felt ok about it that their parents were protecting them. Some did resent it – I’ll send you the detailed results
Martin
Based on our research and talking to operators there’s been no concerns about invasion of privacy. Actually the more common conversation is around child protection and government mandates of operators to filter objective content (web content), bullies, etc.
How can you prevent children to use x-ratede web-content or talk via Viper etc. via WIFI?
Good question, this requires policy enforcement on the device which is a quickly emerging trend. Without policy control on the device Wi-Fi isn’t likely to be content filtered.
Are there any cheap options for emerging markets?
The cost of parental controls heavily depends on the scope of the operator requirements. We’ve seen a lot of emerging markets use parental controls as a method to differentiate one operator from their competitors and do it in a cost justified manner.
in the UK you cannot have spend controls on contracts unless your on a PAYG so how would that be possible to do on UK contract family plans
Unless the mobile operator has controls within w-fi then they can’t. To do this you need control going back to the network.
Cheers
Martin
Hello
It’s easier to apply spend controls to contract family plans than it is to PAYG. Charging system holds a central family balance, which contains balances for each family member – against which the controls are set.
Martin
We have had a lot of inquiries for family plans, however a lot of parents what to have a cap placed on their contracts for spending for the mobiles that their children have, but with no network offering this, it can be a difficult choice for parents in how they can keep control over the spend made by their children
Hello Chris
Operators in the US are offering family plans and also spend limits / controls and they seem to be becoming increasingly popular. Not sure if too many operators in the UK are offering these type of controls yet.
Cheers
Martin
Given that childrens’ behaviors change – how can operators ensure that parental controls stay up to date and relevant?
The best way to do this is deliver controls direct to the handset via a mobile portal or operator provided app – that way the parent can keep in direct control and keep the settings up to date.
Can operators make money from parental controls – is there any evidence of this?
Yes – operators can provide parental controls as a value added service. Some operators currently provide URL filters free of charge, but then charge for more sophisticated offers – e.g. spend controls, numbner filters and re-direct. Operators are doing this now and using parental controls as a differentiator.