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Getting more from prepaid mobile services

• Most companies offering prepaid mobile services destroy value by ignoring customer life-cycle management, an approach used successfully in many other service industries. Instead of tailoring marketing strategies to the behavior and probable lifetime value of specific customer groups, these mobile operators often deploy blanket promotions that give away value needlessly through discounts or free services.
• While a lack of data makes customer life-cycle management particularly hard to implement in prepaid mobile services, innovative companies have mined usage patterns to create microsegments: homogenous groups of as few as 100,000 prepaid customers. They use this segmentation to launch customized marketing campaigns that encourage these groups to spend more.