Value-added services (VAS) are a product type that allows you to add services, such as premium subscriptions to music and video streaming, to your catalog in addition to your core voice, text, and data plans. They are a way for you to expand your existing business relationship with your customers and to generate additional revenue as your customers discover and purchase these products. This can increase
When telco core services were just voice and text in the early days of cellular service, non-telco companies found ways to use the voice and messaging infrastructure to offer services through that infrastructure. These services included ringtones, advanced voicemail, virtual numbers, and a wide variety of information services.
Whether these traditional value-added services were offered to customers directly by telcos or they merely used telco infrastructure, they created additional revenue for telcos, often per instance. For example, customers could get a message containing their daily horoscope for 99 cents per message. Billing was done by the telcos, and telcos earned a share of the revenue with almost no cost.
There was a big shift in cellular network operator strategy as two key advances in the telecommunications field took hold. These advances were:
These changes resulted in huge shifts in carrier offerings and customer behavior.
The rise of smartphone use heralded the app revolution. Developers created apps for just about anything conceivable, and customers downloaded and used those apps with abandon. One large and popular category of apps was and continues to be content consumption apps. The content available thorough those apps goes far, far beyond the simple messaging in traditional value-added services.
That content moves on a cellular carrier's data network. And as more content is being made available in more ways, customers are caring more about the content they get than in the way they get it.
For modern carriers to succeed, they need to embrace their customers' focus on and passion for content consumption. The ItsOn platform leverages the relationship you already have with your customers to enable them to discover and subscribe to a wide variety of content. Value-added service products become the channel through which your customers discover all that content, as well as manage and pay for that content.
Value-added service products allow you to take full advantage of all of Service Design Center's eCommerce capabilities. Not only can you offer third-party content as products in your catalog, where customers can easily find and purchase them, you can
Service Design Center works with aggregators, companies that coordinate and manage the third-party content, to streamline the value-added service product experience. This allows you to have a single source through which you get a wide variety of content for your customers.
An aggregator will provide you with a list of identifiers, each one matched to a third-party content offering. You enter the identifier in the value-added service product settings. When a customer purchases the value-added service product, the identifier tells the aggregator what content gets provided to the customer.
For customers, value-added services allow you to extend the relationships you already have with your customers because the subscriptions provided in value-added service products are cycled, managed, and billed all within {{tag.Product Name}}. Customers simply buy the value-added service product like they would a plan, and then use a link in the product details to activate the value-added service.
In Service Design Center, you can create two types of value-added service products: buy and activate and buy and download.
Buy and activate is the type that you will use for value-added service products most often. What's being offered in this type of value-added service product is a subscription to content, such as a monthly subscription to Hulu.
Once customers buy this type of value-added service content, that activation link that customers receive and use starts the content subscription. Service Design Center then automatically aligns the product cycle with the subscription cycle.
Buy and download is the type that you will use for single-use value-added services, such as ringtones and wallpapers. What's being offered in this type of value-added service product is access to digital content files.
Once customers buy this type of value-added service content, that activation link that customers receive and use allows them the ability to download the digital content to their devices.
A value-added service is a type of virtual/digital product, such as a subscription or a downloadable file, that you can offer to your customers from within your catalog and that is not fulfilled from a {{tag.Product Name}} policy or service. Value-added service products allow you to offer a wider variety of products to your customers than just your telecom products. This can increase
The value-added services themselves are provided by third-party companies. A separate entity, often referred to as an aggregator, manages the integration between you and the third-party companies.
Customers receive an activation link when they purchase a value-added service product. That link is available to customers on the value-added service product detail pages in their current/active subscription list and is typically rendered as a button that customers can tap. Customers use those links to begin the process of acquiring the value added service.
This means that the purchase and acquisition of a value-added product is not a single-step process for customers, as it is with plans. With a plan, customers buy it, and they have it to use as soon as they complete their purchase. With a value-added product, customers buy it, and then have to go though additional steps to get it, steps that are outside your ecosystem and are defined by the aggregator.
There are two types of value-added service products:
The buy and activate type of value-added service represents a subscription offering. This type of value-added services allow you to offer the sale of premium services for those apps from within your catalog, which allows you to have special relationships with subscription-based OTT companies.
For example, you offer a selection of basic voice, text, and data plans. You also offer app-specific plans that have their own data allotments so usage is not charged against basic data plans. Now say that some of these app-specific plans are for streaming services. Some of these streaming services might have multiple tiers of service, such as a free tier that's ad-supported and a premium tier that's ad-free but charges a subscription fee. You can create a value-added service product for the premium tier of the service used in an app plan, which would allow your customers to subscribe to and pay for the premium tier in the same place they buy the app plan: your catalog.
The buy and download type of value-added service represents digital products provided through external vendors. For example, customers like to use wallpaper apps to buy and install new wallpaper on their devices. You could offer a value-added service product to purchase the same wallpapers in your store.