But what exactly does ‘More,’ ‘Flexible’ and ‘Accessible’ actually mean to telco consumers?

Welcome to the third part of our four-part series on mobile consumer insights featuring Singapore! Our first post covered the four telco needs-based consumer segments. Our second post covered that a premium telco image is less to do with age and the number of physical stores and more on the rewards, offerings and the overall customer experience. 

With that, back to answering the opening question.

Digital Vanguards and Savvy Selectors, who comprise a combined 66 per cent of the population, have various needs from their mobile service provider (telco), and each of their use cases would be unique. Among their top telco needs are:

• They offer unlimited mobile data plans
• They provide flexibility to add more data to my plan  
• They have options to make roaming more affordable
• They offer a data-free streaming entertainment package with their service
• They offer a data-free streaming music package with their service
• They provide flexibility to add more SMS to my plan

In our survey, we also saw mobile consumers leaning more towards data-heavy plans (monthly plans featuring 20GB of data and above):

Travellers would want roaming or e-SIM capabilities to seamlessly get data the moment they land. 

Singaporean users who stream a lot of music and videos on their phones would want to add data to their plans on demand, while others can opt for unlimited data plans right out of the gate. 

There is also a growing trend favouring SIM-only plans, including among the flexibility-focused Digital Vanguards. SIM-only plans tend to have shorter minimum contract periods than combo plans that include devices. These can also be mixed together with all the different combinations of needs highlighted above.

Today's mobile users want all these options, want to choose freely, find information on them easily, AND make these transactions on one platform.

This requires telcos to rapidly iterate on new and existing product offerings and roll them out quickly on an easy-to-use digital app. The ability to collect data on product uptake and feedback in a timely manner, make sense of it, and act on it with the right expertise becomes paramount.

Beyond making sense of consumer and product data, the ability to develop and ship new products while enabling the customer to complete their entire journey on a digital app becomes key to closing the loop from innovation to realisation. The digital natives of Singapore now expect to do all their mobile plan management digitally.

At Circles, we built our systems and offerings based on the principles of transparency and giving control to consumers. Our end-to-end telco IT platform lets us rapidly iterate on products customers want while enabling industry-leading customer interactions. 

We did this first through our Singaporean brand Circles.life, with offerings like unlimited data and 5G access are just a few clicks away for our customers to access through our digital app. Our e-SIMs and borderless plans are designed to give make their roaming experience as seamless as we can.

We also enable our partners to provide these experiences as well such as the Japanese telco brand KDDI. 

Together with KDDI we launched their all-digital brand Povo 2.0 and broke new ground through a “0” JPY base plan, giving our customers the freedom to select their preferred “toppings” for the services they want to pay for.

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With all this data, it seems that everyone is increasingly living more of their lives online. Stay tuned because we’re diving more into our final key finding from our study in our next post:

Smartphones’ Tech Convergence - A Hub for Everything from Personal Finance to Wellness

At Circles, we believe in putting customers first and aim to live our mantra of “giving power back to the customer.” We want to share what we can do with as many brands as possible and are always looking for future partners.

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Want to speak to us to find out more about how our end-to-end telco software boosts customer experiences in Singapore, Japan and beyond? Reach out to us today!

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This is part three of our Telco Customer Insights series.

Catch the other posts below: