Modern Talking: Today’s MNO Digital Services Teams Should Be Sharing Knowledge

One of the privileges of working across different mobile markets is that you begin to notice how often remarkably similar problems are being solved by remarkably similar teams, entirely independently (and often completely unaware) of one another. A digital services team in Johannesburg may be trying to improve merchant onboarding without slowing down time to market. Somewhere else, another team is grappling with subscription churn. Another is trying to establish which complaint indicators should trigger intervention, while another is wondering why technically successful integrations are producing disappointing commercial results. Somewhere, quite possibly thousands of kilometres away, somebody has already learned the lesson.

There are perfectly sensible reasons for this. Mobile operators are large organisations, and their teams quite correctly focus on their own customers, commercial objectives and regulatory environments. Where operators compete in the same market, clear boundaries around the exchange of information are essential. Internationally, however, the opportunity becomes particularly interesting. An operator in South Africa and an operator in Kenya, Nigeria, the Netherlands or Brazil may never compete for a single customer, yet the people responsible for their digital services portfolios will recognise many of the same questions. How do you identify good content partners? How much due diligence is enough without making onboarding impossible? What separates a technically successful launch from a commercially successful one? Which early indicators suggest that a service is going to generate complaints? How do you balance conversion, retention and consumer protection? 

Industries are generally very good at sharing their successes. We are considerably less enthusiastic about discussing the campaign that converted beautifully but got the CEO’s aunt unknowingly subscribed, the onboarding process that became so cumbersome that good merchants walked away, or the service everybody expected to succeed (insert big brand name!) but customers simply didn’t want. Yet these experiences often contain the most useful knowledge. A team that has spent six months discovering why something failed possesses information that could save another team six months of discovering precisely the same thing.

So, what can we actually share?

Competition law inevitably enters the conversation here, and rightly so. Competitors exchanging pricing strategies, margins, future commercial plans, individual supplier terms, bidding strategies or customer information can create very serious competition concerns. Any meaningful industry knowledge-sharing initiative therefore needs clearly defined boundaries from the outset.

There is, however, a considerable body of knowledge that can potentially be shared responsibly and usefully. Consumer protection practices, emerging fraud trends or advances, technical implementation lessons, complaint-management processes, regulatory experiences and operational best practice can all help an industry improve collectively. Even something as straightforward as discussing common friction points in merchant onboarding could save considerable time and resources across multiple organisations.

Between straightforward knowledge-sharing and clearly commercially sensitive information lies an especially interesting area: benchmarking and market intelligence. Aggregated and appropriately anonymised information can tell an industry something enormously useful while protecting the commercial information of individual participants. Imagine knowing whether a particular category of digital service generally experiences unusually high early churn across several markets, whether certain onboarding practices consistently correlate with lower complaint levels, or whether particular approaches to consumer education materially improve retention. Those insights can help individual operators make better decisions while leaving each of them entirely free to decide how they compete.

This becomes even more interesting when knowledge travels across borders. Different markets frequently sit at different points of maturity in relation to particular technologies, commercial models or regulatory challenges. Lessons can therefore travel in both directions. A mature market may have years of experience in consumer protection and subscription governance, while a younger, faster-growing market may have developed entirely different approaches to mobile payments, product distribution or customer engagement. The assumption that knowledge always flows from a “developed” market towards an “emerging” one would miss much of the opportunity.

The room needs rules

Good industry collaboration requires more than putting a collection of digital services executives on a Teams call and asking everyone to share ideas. The purpose of the discussion needs to be defined, competition-law boundaries need to be explicit, participants need to understand which subjects are prohibited, and any data used for benchmarking needs to be sufficiently aggregated and anonymised. Someone also needs to be willing to stop a conversation when it begins wandering towards information that should remain firmly within an individual business.

There is an interesting role here for independent industry bodies and neutral facilitators. One-to-one conversations can uncover common challenges without requiring operators to disclose sensitive information directly to one another. Themes can be identified, information stripped of anything commercially identifiable, and useful learning brought back to the wider group. Properly structured, this allows operators to benefit from collective experience while preserving the confidentiality and competitive independence that the market requires.

Much of what constitutes our collective knowledge-base as an industry resides in presentations, dashboards, old campaign results and, perhaps most importantly, in the heads of people who have spent years learning what works. The industry already possesses a great deal of the intelligence it needs to solve its next generation of problems. We simply haven’t become particularly good at sharing it yet.

Operators should continue competing vigorously for customers, revenue and market share. Content providers should compete on the quality and relevance of their services, and on their ability to market it to consumers who want to subscribe. Businesses should differentiate themselves through product, price, customer experience, marketing and innovation. Competition should determine who wins the customer; it doesn’t require everyone to independently reinvent the plumbing. Better fraud prevention, stronger consumer protection, more effective merchant onboarding and a deeper collective understanding of what makes digital services sustainable can strengthen the market in which all of that competition takes place.

There is enormous potential in connecting the people who already possess this knowledge, particularly across international markets where competitive overlap may be limited and the opportunity for learning is substantial. Done carefully, with proper governance and an intelligent understanding of competition law, knowledge-sharing could save teams from repeatedly rediscovering lessons their counterparts elsewhere have already learned.