Background
In 1996, Teligent was a start-up focused on providing competitive wireless communication (voice, video, and data) to small and medium-sized businesses in the US and 12 countries where it had the exclusive license. At the time, there were a large number of companies entering the space as a result of governments de-regulating the industry.
Opportunity
How could Teligent differentiate its service from those also entering the market?
Project
In Phil’s previous work in deploying the first GSM operators in Europe and his role in overseeing the launch of Omnipoint (now T-Mobile), the first GSM mobile operator in the US, he always felt that creating a customer experience portal beyond just the service and billing could create a unique competitive advantage.
Phil pitched the idea to Alex Mandl, former CEO of AT&T and then Chairman of Teligent. Alex agreed and green-lit the project.
The emagine system
The emagine system enabled customers to have “near real-time” access to call information. While that sounds ho-hum in today’s world, remember that we started this project in 1996. The first commercial (non-academic) web browsers came out in 1993 (Mosaic, etc), with Netscape released in 1995.
The key feature that resulted in significant sales growth was the ability of the system to forward information about busy “calls.” If a customer called a business served by Teligent and received a “busy signal, ” Teligent would immediately email the phone number, name, and address to the business so that they could call the customer back to re-capture the business opportunity.
Another feature was the Teligent customers’ ability to download the call details that included the names and addresses of every person who called their business. This allowed the business to build a customer contact database for further marketing.
Other communications providers, including Verizon, AT&T, BT, and many others, copied the features of emagine. Teligent successfully defended its IP and secured either license or had the communication providers remove the infringing features.
Features
- Near Real-time
- Complete transaction detail
- billed
- Un-billed (pending next bill cycle)
- Non-billed (local/LD inbound, etc.)
- Complete and incomplete transactions
- e-Payment/e-Support
- Enhance value
- For example: Name and address
Impact
Customers who access emagine spend 2.9 times more than non-emagine users on a monthly basis with Teligent
Value proposition grows with visits:
- Access 1 to 4 timers per month 2.8x
- Access 5 to 9 times per month 3.9x
- Access 10 to 19 times per month 5.1x
- Access 20 to 50 times per month 16.2x
The demographic mix of customers between users and non-users is almost identical