With the recent scandals involving phone and text lines in the media, public confidence has been damaged and the reputation of companies providing these services has been tarnished.
Recent scandals were: Richard and Judy Phone-In, Blue Peter Phone In, voting for ITV programmes by SMS.
Inevitably this is a small number from many phone-based transactions that are correctly carried out. However, it has led to a 20% drop in ITV’s revenues and BBC removing these from their programmes.
This paper looks at what the issues are for companies providing these services and how txt4ever and immedia24 systems and service avoid such problems.
Why Has There Been Problems?
Firstly it is important to take a look at why some of these errors occurred:
Richard and Judy Show, Channel 4
The problem was that the winner had been chosen some time before the lines had been closed. In effect people were paying to enter a competition which they could not win.
This problem had occurred because the team at their telecom provider, had made a decision to do this.
The biggest issue with this seems to be one of accountability. Who, at a senior level at the telecoms company or for that matter, Channel 4 was ensuring that the competition was complying with the regulations?
X-Factor, ITV
In this instance viewers were charged 50p rather than the advertised 35p giving a reported £200,000 of additional income.
ITV uncovered the problem during their own audit and responded quickly by making a sizable donation to charity. They were not fined by Ofcom.
The reasons for this error have not been reported, but it is likely to be human error where the systems were set to bill at the wrong price. Each ‘price’ is linked to a specific PSMS number – a 5 digit short code. It is quite possible that operators could have mistakenly chosen the wrong 5 digit number.
The BBC Blue Peter scam was connected to a phone-in, but it was not a telecoms error. The TV producers picked a ‘winner’ from the studio audience, not the voters.
Prevention
Built in Systems
It is important that systems prevent the possibility of human error or fraudulent activity as much as possible.
For example, with the problems at Channel 4, it would have been relatively simple to design the system so that the winner was picked out from the database of entrants. Once this had been done the system would no longer allow entries.
With the incorrect price setting in the X-Factor scenario, it is impossible to do this within immedia24 or txt4ever. All of our premium rate systems work on the basis of replying to an incoming message from a user.
The cost of the reply is clearly shown when it is set by the user, rather than simply showing the 5 digit number used. There is a further confirmation once this has been set.
The system also generates the necessary copy to add to any publicity or announcement (eg texts cost 25p + 1 message at your standard rate).
Thus the only way to make an error with the system is to act either fraudulently or negligently by ignoring the published rates and changing the price shown on the copy.
Open Accounting
Aside from improving systems, the human error or even dishonest side cannot be ignored. To prevent many of these problems there should have been better checking at a more senior level. Better accounting on the side of the TV companies may have helped prevent these problems.
Our systems are designed to give clients complete accounting on a real-time basis. So, for example if an SMS was advertised at 35p but was charging 50p the end client could view the live messages and see that there was an error.
All of our message reports and transaction reports can exported as a data file, which can be used by clients for accounting and further analysis.
On our customer support side, we monitor all of our systems throughout the day and test each new campaign set up by our clients.
Our own back end accounting system will also highlight any anomalies in the billing system. An example of how this has been managed is with fraudulent credit card transactions relating to our personal SMS product. We discovered a number of transactions from non-UK users that were clearly fraudulent in spite of the fact that they passed checks by both the bank and online processor. The system that we designed eradicates the fraud problem by checking the user details along side the username, password and even some message content. This is something that the credit card processing companies have been unable to do.
We are therefore confident that we can initiate other fraud checking and prevention facilities for other areas in our system.
Terms and Conditions Penalties
Along with providing good systems and accountability, we have included penalties in our Terms and Conditions which requires our clients to ensure the good management of their campaigns. Where conditions have been breached, for example a premium SMS campaign where the advertised price is different to the actual price, we would have the right to both suspend and account and to retain outstanding monies to cover any losses. Even though an out-payment to a supplier would be around 90p for a £1.50 premium message, we would retain all of the £1.50 in order to facilitate a refund to the mobile user – something that would be impossible to do via the mobile phone networks.
Conclusion
TV voting and phone-in’s have been seen as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow by both broadcasters and telecoms providers alike. This gold-rush by some telecoms providers has not necessarily been matched by good technology or accounting systems to manage this. This is not surprising in an industry which is characterised by hidden and expensive charges.
The profits of the last few years from TV-based voting are set to drop. Channel 4 has halved the price of Big Brother Voting and the general decline in viewers to reality TV will see fewer voters.
The focus of our products and our service is very different to this. Our underlying ethos is not about gaining a quick buck from a TV campaign. What we are doing is creating an ongoing and beneficial relationship with our customers and the end mobile user.
No comments:
Post a Comment