Cut your mobile bills to half

Post-paid customers, who make up 20 per cent of mobile users but account for 50 per cent of the revenue, are generally at sea when choosing the right cellphone plan or operator. Help is at hand.

Texas-based technology-enabled business value services provider, Trilogy, has developed a real-time solution, which has been ported on its website YourBillBuddy.com.

All that an Indian subscriber needs to do is to logon to the site and upload the latest e-bill.

The site, in a 'milli-second', will break down the bill into multiple components, compare them against the tariff plans of each mobile operator and then suggest the best plan for the subscriber's kind of usage.

"We have developed a very intelligent algorithm, which has been patented. It basically categorises all the bill plans in certain modules. With the algorithm, we feed in the latest bill plans launched by the various telecom operators. The algorithm is designed in such a way that whenever a bill is uploaded, in parses the bill into various calling categories like local voice, STD voice, ISD voice and SMS, and rates the bill across various rate plans. Then it suggests the best rate plan across all the operators for the kind of usage by a subscriber," said Virendra Gupta, director, Telecom Services, Trilogy.

The service, which is free for end-users, has been launched initially in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai � it covers plans available to customers in these areas. The company is planning to launch this in all other cities in a couple of weeks where Internet penetration is substantial. The company is also planning to launch the service for pre-paid mobile subscribers for which it is now busy developing a suitable platform which will not be based on the e-bills, said Gupta.

Within a month of the official launch of the service, Trilogy claims to have recorded 12,000 registered users and over 60,00 visitors. Based on user feedback, the company is planning to launch a new value-added feature wherein a user can upload his/her phonebook easily which will keep the contacts safe even with a change of handset.

The company aims to target telecom service providers for its revenue. "We believe that by providing a customer with the best plan, he will choose an operator or a plan (of the existing operator) based on fundamental value rather than perception. This will help the operator retain existing customers and also acquire high-value customers," said Gupta.

He added that customers can switch operators or plans by the click of a mouse only with operators with whom Trilogy has an agreement, that is as a result of the switch it earns a fee. The customer is of course free to take the information from the site and make the switch on his own. Ultimately, Trilogy hopes to be of help to TRAI in making life simpler and more transparent for customers and turn this into a business proposition.

The company plans to launch the service in many other countries basing on its success in India. "India is our flagship country for this product and once we prove our model here, we want to expand to markets like China, Europe and the US," he added. Trilogy's development team is based out of its R&D centres in India, China and US. Bangalore houses 300 out of the company's total 500 engineers. Its revenue comes mostly from the US but it is increasingly turning to markets like India and China.

The private firm, founded by CEO Joe Liemandt in 1989, has grown within 10 years to become one of the world's largest privately-held software companies, claims the Trilogy website. Trilogy gets paid by helping firms improve their topline and bottomline by delivering business value through its value services. It has "dozens" of customers from among Fortune 1000 firms.

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