A Few Data Points On Mobile Messaging
by Daniel Taylor
Market research firm J.D. Power and Associates announced the company’s 2007 UK Mobile Telephone Customer Satisfaction StudySM which provides an few pieces of data relevant to the topic of mobile messaging. In a survey of 2,706 mobile telephone customers (both pre-paid and contract), they found the following changes from 2006 to 2007.
The average number of weekly calls made by pre-pay customers has dropped from 14 in 2006 to 10 per week, and the average number of text messages has stayed the same at 27. Among contract customers, the number of calls made per week has dropped from 35 in 2006 to 27 in 2007, while text messages have increased considerably, from 32 to 46.
With the biggest finding being that although pre-paid customers are flat on SMS, contract customers are making fewer calls and sending more text messages.
This raises the obvious question of whether we — as users — are learning how to use our mobile tools more effectively. We understand the telephone pretty well, but messaging is something that is relatively new for most of us.
Are we learning to replace the telephone with messaging? Or is there more to it than pure substitution?
I’d argue the latter, but I don’t know if the statistics are there to prove it. If users give up eight telephone calls and replace them with fourteen SMS, that’s 1.75 messages per call that would make a strong case for substitution.
So if Mobile Messaging 1.0 is simple and pure substitution of messages for telephone calls, then what would 2.0 be?
