Mobile Data - Your allowance is over

Had been thinking on the preferable operator practices on customer allowance getting exhausted before month end. 

A good parallel would be you driving your car on a highway and run out of fuel with no petrol pump in sight. You had filled in some fuel before embarking on the journey but you did not understand the signs and did not know how long would your journey and so how much fuel was needed. 

Now here's what current operator options would sound like to you:

1) Throttling: We understand that you have run out of fuel . Good news! We have a new technology and you can continue to drive on water for free!! However your car will only move at 5 kmpl. At this point if your end of journey is near you may continue or in most cases just park the car by the road side and ask for a bus. 

  

2) Overage charging: Of course you may continue to drive. Our real time fuelling chopper will reach you in a minute. Just that we will charge you 40 times the normal fuel rates. 

How would you feel about both the options?  For one thing. Most probably you will give up driving !!

Now for a third option. What if at the beginning of the journey you had some body to tell you how much fuel would the journey take. Or if during the journey the were regular signs to tell you how much of the journey is left and you had diesel stations in between to refuel?

I am sure you expect these basics while on every road. Why not expect the same while on the digital highway?

There was a research carried out by Strategy Analytics that data customers prefer alerts with top up options above overage charging or throttling. It is a both a revenue and customer friendly option and it is time operators started implementing the same.