“Telephia has an operation that is both highly technical and well-respected and
accepted by the carrier community,” adds DeSautels. The company also offers some automated systems that will make the process of testing each third-party content provider’s offerings less labor intensive.
Telephia began testing the auditing system in late 2006, and by May 2007 the program was up and running. “Telephia did a good job of utilizing a number of the technologies that it already uses for other tests of carrier networks and services to roll out this new kind of audit and monitoring service fairly quickly,” DeSautels continues.
Educational process will reduce problem areas
When consumers order third-party content, they usually punch in four, five, or six digit numbers on their cell phones to do so. These numbers are known as short codes. As the monitoring program is currently set up, Telephia will audit each of the 500-plus short codes that currently in use every month.
“We go through the exact experience that a consumer would go through when they try to execute a short code to purchase some product or service,” Petersen explains. After that, Telephia will follow that particular short code through an entire billing cycle to make sure that the best practices are followed every step of the way through cancellation of service.
“Consumers want to have some level of trust that when you buy something you’re going to get what you pay for and that you can have an honest relationship with whomever sold you the service,” Peterson adds.
Each wireless carrier will get a confidential monthly report from Telephia that outlines how each third-party content provider is performing.
“At this point we feel there are degrees of problems,” says DeSautels. “There are what we might term technical violations of the best practices, that while not in compliance might not be egregious in a way that would require some significant action.” An example of that might be a content provider neglecting to put a dollar sign in front of a monetary amount to save characters, even though the cost of the subscription is otherwise laid out well.
A content provider’s failure to state terms of service or costs would be considered a more serious violation, he adds. “That would prompt us to code the reports to let the carrier know that this was a violation of significance that it needs to attend to.” Initial reports indicate that there are substantive problems with only four percent of total content offerings.
