Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Cingular Off Portal Purchasing Control (OPPC) System

Cingular announces important changes to the way its Subscription and Refund Management (SRM) system will work, mainly to improve Cingular's visibility over end-user subscription status to 3rd party content.

Under the new and revised SRM system, content providers no longer need to handle the double opt-in user interaction before starting a new subscription on Cingular's SRM platform. Instead Cingular will handle the double opt-in management through its Qpass billing platform.

Here's the old message flow:


And here's the new message flow:


The new system has the advantage that Cingular customer service reps will be able to handle consumer complaints more effectively and verify consumer claims about opt-in status to specific campaigns.

For Quios customers who use the Quios Permission Management System (QPMS) no changes will be needed. Quios will handle the revised requirements transparently to our customers.

The change-over is expected to take place by the end of Q3 2007.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Marc, Asher here from GoLive! Mobile...hope all is well! :) I imagine Quios is implementing major changes to the QPMS platform for OPPC, as are we and everybody else.

About a year ago, many of us thought the regulations for premium billing were going to get looser, following the Asia/Europe model...but in fact, they are getting much stricter.

This is good for the long-term industry, as it should prevent Premium SMS going the route of 900 #'s. It is also good for providers such as Quios, who have built permissions systems which 'abstract' these carrier complexities from the content providers.

In the short-term, though, clearly these regs will be tough on content providers as they are adding significant delays and requirements to the already burdensome process. The message to content providers should be:

MAKE SURE THAT YOUR VENDOR IS AWARE OF THESE INDUSTRY CHANGES, AND IMPLEMENTING SOLUTIONS!

Anyways congrats on Quios' recent successes, and best of luck to you and the team.

Thanks,

Asher Delug
Managing Partner
GoLive! Mobile LLC
http://www.golivemobile.com

iText Global said...

Hey, thanks for the post - OPPC is a great concept, I'm glad cingular got it to work! Thanks again for the great article!