Personalized Pager Information Services: Increase Revenues

By Carol DiGiulio

The wireless industry is among the fastest growing in the United States, with over 34 million pagers currently in use. The American consumer invested $340 million on paging devices in 1995 – a yearly increase of 24%, with the trend continuing through the year 2000.

Telecommunications companies are investing vast amounts in wireless technologies and infrastructure on both a national and worldwide basis. Paging carriers and resellers are scrambling to incorporate services that will differentiate themselves from their competition. These companies realize that survival depends on retaining and expanding their customer base. What does your company offer that differentiates you from your competitors? Personalized pager services not only can differentiate you in the marketplace, but also increase profit margins, and reduce churn.

Information services delivered via pager are designed to take maximum advantage of the explosive growth in the wireless industry and the consumer’s increasing demand for meaningful real-time information.

Personalized Pager Information services are quite another matter. A sampling of personalized information services are:

Personalized stock quote information tailored to an individual’s current portfolio, provide alerts as their stock price moves in real-time. Individuals can specify exactly what information about their stocks they wish to know, and receive discrete pager alerts as the action is happening. This type of information allows the individual to make real-time decisions about investments without having to rely on a broker or the news media for the information.

Sports information personally selected by the individual allow choices that can include their college teams, area team, and can be customized to provide period scores, score-by-score updates, or a combination of both.

Personal schedule reminders provide alerts regarding business appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, medical appointments and more. An individual can submit an annual list of dates they wish to be reminded of, then update their list to include personal appointment schedules as often as needed.

Personalized traffic alerts deliver critical information about the road conditions and accidents in specific traffic zones, allowing the traveler to make alternate arrangements or take other routes before they are caught in traffic. Traffic alerts are delivered before the information is delivered by radio and can be referenced before a subscriber even enters the car.

In addition to customized individual information services, resellers can also offer group alerts tied to specific needs:

School notification programs allow school personnel to make one phone call, and have information regarding school closings due to weather, delayed openings, school bus delays and more delivered to parents on their alpha pagers. No longer is it necessary for parents to fear missing an important call, and schools have fewer phone calls to handle.

The next level of school-linked service is the delivery of customized alerts providing assignment deadlines, scheduled PTA/PTO meetings, call for volunteers, or information to parents about what their child is studying for the week to allow them to take a more active role in their children’s education.

Executive work groups can receive instant notification of company news, meeting announcements, location changes, and more by just one phone call that can be initiated by any group member by simply using a security password  This is an extremely cost effective alternative to business communication needs. This is a  terrific service for a company with an outside sales force as well.

Market Differentiation: Pager resellers who provide personalized real-time pager services experience less churn, and find customers upgrading from digital to alpha pagers. And, of greatest importance, resellers can charge substantially more for personal information customers elect to receive. This means more revenues in a business where profit margins are diminishing as companies compete for market share.

To learn more about how personalized pager services can enhance your business, contact Carol DiGiulio, Vice President of Alert Technologies, LLC. Carol can be reached at 800-316-8932.

[From Connection Magazine, November 1996]

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