Scale up with moments – from unique offerings to a portfolio of moments

In this 5th and final part of our insight series, we’re taking the next step towards making your moments business come alive. We’ll explore how you can move from individual moments offerings, which we discussed in part 3 and part 4, to a full portfolio of offerings addressing different kinds of moments. But before we do, let’s take a moment to recap the series so far.

• Moments are situations when emotional stakes run high. We hope, desire or fear something – and we are suddenly willing to pay a premium, if we can get the outcome we want.
• Moments represent an opportunity for the telecom industry to use differentiated connectivity to bring in new revenue from both the existing customer base and new consumer and enterprise opportunities, on top of existing “best effort” business.
• We see  four types of moments. The planned moments, Wow and Flow, are the easier to get started with. The spontaneous moments, Done and Win, are a bit harder to deliver on, but target the situations  when the value of connectivity peaks.

So, where do you go after getting your first moment offering off the ground? Now, it’s time to shift the perspective away from the individual moment opportunities and look at the bigger picture – how you can start building a portfolio of moment offerings.

Taking a broader, portfolio perspective on moments is an important step for taking moments from an inspiring idea or one-offs, to making them an integral part of your business. Scaling your portfolio will be necessary to make the most out of moments. By building a critical mass of services, moments can begin to generate significant continuous revenue, on top of your existing “best effort” business, and drive growth.

With a portfolio of offerings , you can take advantage of a wider range of moments based on different mechanisms driving the willingness to pay. Not only does it let you build multiple new revenue streams but also lets you diversify your business, build synergies between offerings, and hedge your bets , bringing you better ROI on network investments and giving you revenue flows from across customer segments.

A well composed moments portfolio should give you scale, balance and strength. It should balance moments that happen on different times of day, weekends and weekdays, specific locations or network wide to maximize the value of your performance. It lets you target both common consumer needs to build volume, as well as capture high value use cases for professionals, enterprises, and the public sector. It also provides balance between on-demand, subscription and API-based wholesale revenue.

It might take some time before you have a broader moments portfolio to manage but thinking about these dynamics early on will make it easier to find a good balance, while you are working to reach a critical mass of guaranteed services.

So, how do you get started with building your own moments portfolio? The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. There are already great cases you can take inspiration from. To date, 118 differentiated connectivity services have already been tested, and 65 of these, from 33 different CSPs, are now full commercial offerings, according to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report.

There still plenty of room for innovation, but here, we have extracted the experiences from these pioneering cases to give you some tips and tricks for getting started. They will help you take advantage of previous successes, expand your portfolio more efficiently, and build better returns on any network investment. Here are three different ways that will help you expand your portfolio: 

• Expand your range of services in a location type:
  Diversify your portfolio to build a broader base for your ROI
• Expand similar services to new target groups:
  Quickly replicate successful services efficiently towards new target groups
• Expand the reach of your success cases:
  Reach broader audiences by extending successful services via new channels

Let’s dig a bit deeper into these three dimensions to see how you can use them to broaden your moments portfolio.

One location – many moments

The adage “location, location, location” is also true for moments. Let’s say you got your moments business started with a Wow moment for influencers at a big arena concert. That’s a great start, but why stop there? The same arena is also home to many other opportunities, like Flow moments for broadcasters, payment terminals for vendors inside and outside the venue, video feeds for the security crews, as well as done moments for photojournalists, wow moments for sports, or win moments for streamers, and more.

This location-based approach lets you expand into a diversified portfolio of consumer, enterprise and wholesale offerings, that you can mix and match to enhance almost any activity at the arena. This also helps you get better returns on your local performance level investment and makes it easy to take the whole concept to other arenas across your footprint. Similar packages can be created for airports, transport hubs, city centers, industrial or business parks, and more, will help you reach scale and strengthen ROI on different types of network expansions.

One offering – many target-groups

If you find one offering that works, it’s a great idea to look for new target groups to apply it to. Let’s say you’ve successfully set up an SLA for one specific enterprise service – a flow moment – how much do you really have to change to provide assurances for a different service? While setting up a service the first time might take some technical effort, the beauty of moments is that you can often address new services or targets groups with almost the same offering, and only a few small tweaks.

Copying, pasting and adapting services to new target groups is essential to help you reach the critical mass of services needed to make moments a self-sustaining part of your business. In some cases, changing the service name, marketing and pricing might be enough to reach completely new segments. In more complex cases, you might need to fine tune the specifics of the offering, to fit their performance requirements. This approach lets you build a whole portfolio of specialized services, quickly and with relatively little effort, that you can approach new customers with.

One need – many channels

Another way to expand your portfolio is to extend the reach of successful services. Let’s say that your continual QoS for video conferencing offering – a flow moment – has worked out well. That’s great, but this sort of offering might not fit all types of companies. Here, you can broaden the appeal by creating a similar win moment offering, baked into your business subscriptions, that lets customer access QoS on-demand. Further down the line, you can also create a similar, API-based offering targeting video conferencing players, using their market presence to further increase your reach.

Here, you’re expanding your portfolio by making virtually the same service available, as different type of moments, by using other channels to increase your reach. Moments are a very flexible approach with many options for targeting the same need. It’s not either or. Evolving successful services into new moment types, using new channels, lets you use different business and revenue models to make the most out of the opportunity, making it an efficient, low risk way to expand your portfolio.

There are lots of moments to monetize out there and even more will come as new devices and use cases are introduced. Getting your first few moments going is one thing, but how do build scale and reach a critical mass of services faster? How do you handle 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of services, each with lots of users efficiently?

Here it can be useful to look at services from the perspective of what guarantee you are promising your customer. These guarantees can be grouped into three broad categories:

From a practical perspective, these services are a bit different, and scaling these three types of services requires a different set of tools in your network.

If you already have the right tools for the type of service, you can quickly build a whole portfolio. You can just copy, paste and tweak the specifics of a service to match the needs of a new moment. In this case, expanding your portfolio is mostly about finding new use cases, developing them, and launching your new services, one-by-one, helping you to build scale quickly.

If you instead want to expand into services for which you don’t have the industrialization, you might want to change your approach. Getting new tools requires a bit of investment and takes some time. Here, the best approach is to spend that time developing a range of new services that you can roll out at launch, to help you build scale and get returns on your investment faster.

Thinking about which category to start with, which services you want to go for in the category, and when to expand into new categories, will help you scale your portfolio faster and more efficiently. Make sure to involve your technology organization at an early stage to make your journey towards a critical mass of moments as smooth as possible.

This marks the end of our series. We hope that this short series has inspired you to start exploring, monetizing and scaling moments to capture this new revenue that, so far, has been left on the table. Our research shows that an assured event experience, at the right time, can be worth up to 10x as much to users than speed.*

Now, with 5G Standalone, you have the foundation to move beyond traditional best-effort services, and start addressing these untapped, opening the door for a new market of guaranteed and assured services. As we mentioned earlier, 33 frontrunners have already reached commercial deployment of their services. Now is the time to get going.

Find out more about what other are doing with differentiated connectivity in the latest Ericsson Mobility Report.

* How 5G transforms big events for consumers