2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Mobile Converged Rich Communication Services: A Conjoint Analysis Shahrokh Nikou IAMSR/Åbo Akademi University &TUCS
[email protected]
Harry Bouwman Delft University of Technology & IAMSR
[email protected]
charge Internet-based services12. As such, operators are forced to either settle for the bit pipe scenario or come up with new, innovative communication services that cannot be replicated by the Internet players. Luckily for operators, several technological developments are already underway that provide the means to develop more innovative rich communication services. Fixedmobile convergence, using all-IP networks will enable operators to exert more control on the quality of service of communication sessions, which is generally still an issue with mobile VoIP services from Internet players [26, 15]. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) enables new session-based communication services, which may allow users to switch between their mobile phone, PC and laptop seamlessly while in a (video) telephony session. Rich Communication Suite (RCS) standards have been pushed by telecom operators for several years, and would especially enable enhanced address-books that are automatically updated as well as richer presence information on the user’s device. Although such service ideas might be replicated by Internet players, operators may be able to offer superior feeling of privacy, reliability and security that users may prefer. In more theoretical terms, the current battle between operator centric communication platforms and cloud centric communication platforms can be characterized as a platform battle. In an earlier contribution [18], we discussed how these different platform types influence, for example, flexibility and convenience not only for end-users but also for application developers and third party service providers. As academic literature is increasingly focusing on device centric platforms, many authors, more or less, postulate that operator centric platforms will lose the battle. However, given the efforts of operators to standardize and develop operator centric platforms in initiatives like OMA (Open Mobile Alliance), it is still worthwhile to explore if operator’s platforms may be preferred by end-users. This paper
Abstract To enable rich communication services, mobile operators are developing various IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)- based technologies for they fear that their present voice and SMS business will soon be substituted by newer IP-based services from Internet companies. They reason that since the new rich communication services — such as enhanced presence, group communication and seamless switching between devices and media types within the same communication session — provide secure and more reliable services than those offered by Internet companies —Skype, Whatsapp and Google, for instance— consumers will readily appreciate their values and consequently use them. To validate these claims, this paper analyzes the results of a conjoint survey among 82 respondents in Netherlands, France and Spain, examines if users are really willing to adopt these rich communication services and, if so, whether or not issues like reliability and security impact their decision to do so. Results indicate that while users are most interested in “presence” features of rich communication services, they hardly appreciate other services like “switching devices” and “media during communication sessions”, “file sharing” and “group communication”. Still, for any of these services, reliability, security and interoperability are valued as important requirements. These findings contribute to theoretical debate on platform competition.
1. Introduction While European operators have long given up the dream to be mobile content service providers or aggregators [17], they are also facing the risk of losing their profitable voice and SMS business to Internet players. All across Europe, operators see their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) rates decreasing because of over-the-top communication services like mobile VoIP, Whatsapp and social media like Facebook and Twitter. Especially, younger generations are massively switching from SMS towards these generally free-of-
978-0-7695-4525-7/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2012.434
Mark de Reuver Delft University of Technology
[email protected]
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http://www.slideshare.net/Hoskamikaze/kpn-investors-dayoverall-strategy-20112015 2
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http://www.whatsapp.com/
characteristics and user service perceptions. Conventional adoption and acceptance theories such as Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) treats technology as a block box [16, 29], i.e. only the more generic conceptual concepts and not specific characteristics of the technology under study are discussed. Besides, as adoption and use of advanced mobile service is a subtle interplay of context characteristics, user and personality characteristics, and characteristics of the technology [37]. We can therefore, argue that there is still an essential quest in the literature to open up the “black-box” of characteristics of the new information technology innovations by identifying the users’ preferences on mobile service and service characteristics. Moreover, it is a mutual consensus between the academics and practitioners that technological advances and innovative mobile services do not directly lead to widespread adoption and use of mobile services [4, 10, 13]. Users are in principle lazy and [34], argued that there is a strong correlations between innovativeness and effort to use as well as between innovativeness and situational context. There is also a negative correlation between the advancement of mobile service and the adoption. For instance [12], argued that the development of mobile services, mobile commerce and mobile Internet has been intense for years, but adoption has not progressed as expected. Moreover, [25], argued that the hedonic values of mobile services has direct impact on users’ intention to use mobile game services. Contextual usage of mobile services, on the other hand, has been found as an important variable. For instance, [37], argued that the intention to use mobile services is dependent on the situational context. With regard to mobile communication and specifically mobile VoIP services [35], found service cost, security, QoS, complexity and privacy are the most important independent variables which will affect the adoption of VoIP and other converged IP services. VoIP services have been speculated as potential disruptive services by [40]. Moreover, [31], indicated the success of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter and their use via mobile devices, is in providing users with mechanisms to communicate their daily activities. Based on the above argumentation and according to the conjoint analysis requirements, we have identified several constructs which significantly affect users’ intentions to use. These constructs are considered as dependent variables in our questionnaire and brief introduction is given in following section for each of them. Likelihood of use, basically we are looking to see whether the new services are attractive to users and if they affect their intention to use. Services can be tailored to preferences in segments based on gender,
examines if users are really willing to adopt these rich communication services and if they evaluate issues like reliability and security as important in their decision, and if so, if they prefer to adopt them from operators rather than Internet players. Specifically, we propose five rich communication service functionalities enabled by technologies such as IMS, Rich Communication Services (RCS) and mobile cloud computing concepts. These five functionalities are loosely based on the service concepts that are being developed in the European project Celtic-Comesi, in which operators Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Italia, as well as software companies SQS, Acision, Movial and Pace are collaborating. We examined the users’ willingness to adopt these services by analyzing the results of a conjoint survey which was carried out among 82 users in Netherlands, Spain and France. Although a convenience sample was used, the respondents are probably the early target group as most of them were young or high-income smartphone owners. This paper contributes to the discussion in the mobile telecommunications domain on if and how operators can counter the threat from Internet players that look to take over their voice and SMS business. Theoretically, our paper will contribute both to understanding why users intend to adopt advanced mobile services and creating insight into the consumer-related factors which drive the war between competing service platforms. To provide the required grounding for these research purposes, the rest of this paper is organized in the following sections. Section 2 discusses related work and derives the dependent variables that will be used in the conjoint, and that may themselves in turn influence the willingness of users to adopt mobile (communication) services. Section 3 discusses the procedures for developing five rich -communication service functionalities, explicating how they are driven by technological trends of RCS, IMS, and mobile cloud computing. Section 4 provides the methodology and Section 5 the results. And Finally Section 6 concludes the paper with discussion, limitations and directions for further research.
2. Related Work Although the rapid development in telecommunication technology in recent years has enabled mobile industries, within their computing, entertainment, and communications power, to identify their strategic roles by offering new services created by these developments. It is unlikely that demand for richer communication services is restricted only to the technological advancement, and not to service
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accept to some degree losing of privacy, if the benefit is perceived as large enough.
age, context of use, for example, thus increasing the likelihood that the service will be used [27]. If the mobile service provider can provide personalized services, then the chance for attracting more users is high [21]. Fitting into day-to-day routine, this would result if the services are useful and improve the users’ task performance. If so, then the chance that the services fit into users’ daily activities is high and they will use them. The mobile services must be designed in such a way that improve users’ daily operational activities [20]. Enjoyment, some mobile service are designed to entertain the users. By asking this question we would like to know if the users would enjoy using the services. For example, the values of the individual may differ depending on the type of services they are using, for instance, for leisure or business, where the former ought to call for services which are enjoyable rather than efficiency [19]. In terms of enjoyment, the service must entertain the users while users using Mobile TV services in rather small screen [2]. Willingness to pay, this question indicates how much the users are prepared to pay for using the new services. If service is implemented with reference to the users’ context, then they users are ready to pay [5], customers satisfaction is also an important issue [24]. Innovativeness, this question shows how innovative the services are based on the users’ opinions. The services might be highly innovative –like Mobile RFID, but users will not use it due to extra effort they need to put for using the service [9]. Reliability, is operator’s or network’s ability to perform a designated set of functions under certain conditions for specified operational times [32]. Mobile service providers must have a reliable network infrastructure in order to be able to provide service satisfaction for the users and [38], argued that trust will grow if operators increase their network reliability and redundancy. Service security, means how the users’ data and information security are guaranteed when using the services. Security issues are important as they may affect the perceived quality of service by a customer [39], and [3], argued that the security issues are the key determinates for designing mobile commerce services. Service privacy, addresses users’ concern about being tracked and if they find the service are intruding while using such a service. For instance, [22], found that privacy protection in location-aware services is related to the right to locate a person, use the location, store the location and forward the location. Moreover, [1], argued that, users often make the trade-off between privacy intrusion and user benefit. The users would
3. Next Generation of Communication Services In this section, we propose five rich communication service functionalities that are developed in the COMESI project. Converged MultimEdia communication Suite over IMS (COMESI) is a collaborative research project aiming to provide new, innovative communication services that cannot be replicated by the Internet players. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) [11], is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia services. The main purpose of the IMS is to aid the access of voice and multimedia applications from wireless and wire line terminals. To do so, IMS uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP3) to ease the integration with the Internet. SIP, on the other hand, is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) signaling protocol. SIP is a widely used signaling protocol for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet Protocol (IP). Comesi project will leverage the IMS/SIP technology and protocol to provide seamless interoperability between different networks and proposes multi device/media communication services within the same session. The first two service functionalities are therefore: - Switching between devices: enables users to switch between devices without interrupting the communication session (service continuity), e.g., PC to mobile phone - Switching between media: enables users to switch between communication types (service continuity), e.g., voice to video. Another aim of the Comesi project is to propose convergent communication services based on the Converged IP Messaging (CPM) framework being specified by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) forum. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA4) is a standard body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry. The Comesi project will use current standards like OMA CPM (Converged IP Messaging) and associated OMA CAB (Converged Address Book) and industry initiatives like Rich Communication Suite (RCS5). These standards, protocols and initiatives enable mobile operators to provide new and yet robust 3
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/ http://www.openmobilealliance.org/ 5 http://www.richcommunicationsuite.com/?gclid=CMHI_NKYs6 kCFYUXzQodyX0AKA 4
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utility of various dimensions and characteristics of service concepts. Conjoint analysis borrows and adapts the concept of manipulation from the experimental tradition. From the survey tradition they borrow the greater richness of detail and complexity that characterizes real-life circumstances [30]. The basic idea is to present people with contrived hypothetical situations. These situations, scenarios, vignettes, or cases are developed by combining characteristics of situations that will play a role in the decision making process, for instance in adopting, using or paying for a service (see for an extensive discussion of conjoint analysis [7]. A conjoint study usually involves showing respondents product profiles and asking them to indicate (in a variety of ways) how much they like or prefer these alternative product profiles. Statistics are then used to work out the contribution that each product attribute is making to the overall likeability. Conjoint measurement has the ability to place the "importance" or "value" on the different attributes a particular product or service is composed of, while in most of the traditional rating survey and analysis this is not applicable. Conjoint measurement is considered to be the most effective technique in extracting consumer’s behavior into a quantitative or an empirical measurement. Traditional survey approaches ask respondents to estimate how much value they place on each attribute. Conjoint analysis attempts to break the task into a series of choices or ratings. These choices or ratings, when taken together, allow computing the relative importance of each of the attributes studied. Instead of "stated importance", conjoint analysis uses "derived importance" values for each attribute or feature. We believe mobile service characteristics, service functionalities or service adoption can be evaluated or analyzed with different types of methods such as, conventional survey and Q-sort analysis. However, as the converged rich communication services are new for the respondents taking part in this study, and also because individual service functionalities –like file sharing or presence might sound vague concepts for the users, we found conjoint analysis to be an appropriate method to assess the consumers’ perceptions.
innovative rich communication services for instance Group Communication or Presence/Availability. - Presence / Availability service: allows the users to see on which device their friends would like to be reached. - Group Communication service: enables users to have an advanced teleconference service that allows multiple devices and multiple ways of messaging, including multimedia (a combination of IM, voice and video calls). The last but not the least converged rich communication service functionality proposed by the Comesi project is file sharing. This service leverages the Cloud infrastructure services, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS6) mechanism to deliver computer infrastructure. - File Sharing: allows sharing multimedia content among friends via a drive space in the operator network on multiple devices including TV, mobile phone and PC.
4. Methodology Conjoint analysis has extensively been used in marketing research to assess the impact of selected product/service characteristics on customer preferences for products/services. The services under investigations in this study are not commercially launched in the market yet, therefore, conjoint study can be an appropriate method to evaluate the functionality of these new services. Moreover, in this study we are interested in users’ willingness to adopt the new converged rich communication services. The service concepts in the use cases provide various service elements (e.g., voice calling, messaging, video conferencing and photo sharing) that are offered via various session types (e.g., mobile cellular network, WiFi, fixed network) and modalities (e.g., mobile phone, TV, PC). The service concepts use common building blocks, like address books and switching over modalities. The aim of this paper is to see if users are really willing to adopt rich communication services that are likely to emerge with the roll out of converged rich communication services built upon IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) technology. We used a traditional conjoint analysis approach. Conjoint measurement is a model and technique used to assess the different weights individuals place on the variables presented to them in a given purchase situation. In a conjoint analysis a product or a service can be modeled as an entity with a set of attributes. Conjoint analysis is a sophisticated, non-obtrusive way of measuring the 6
4.1. Conjoint Analysis (Critical Design Issues) There are some critical design issues in conjoint analysis that must be carefully addressed. A conjoint analysis must consist of the attributes, where the product features are identified, level of attributes, where the levels represent specific amounts of particular attributes and one specific approach to conjoint analysis. There are mainly five types of
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of service profiles (situation or concepts), based on design specifications. Usually, in full profile conjoint studies, the respondents rate each of these service profiles on, often 7 points Likert scale. In conjoint study it is important to use orthogonality to assess the independent effect of each of the attributes. The universe of all factorial objects is based on all the relevant attributes and their levels. For example, in our case, we have 5 attributes and two-levels within each attribute. A simple calculation shows that the universe consists of 32, (25) create 32 unique objects. We ask respondents to make judgments on the likelihood of choosing an alternative service. The unique combination of all the different levels of all the different attributes characterizes a situation. The set of all possible combinations of all levels of all concepts is called the factorial object universe. It will be a tedious task for a respondent to deal with these large numbers of alternatives (stimuli) and this in turn would jeopardize the validity of the research. Based on an orthogonal design using SPSS software, we will get 8 unique cases out of the 32 objects. To this end, the type of conjoint approach (full profile) is defined as well as the attributes and their levels are defined. Then, the next step is to create a scenario for each of the conjoint profiles created after orthogonal design. Nevertheless, using multiple salient criteria might result in scenarios that are not realistic in nature. Therefore, 8 scenarios or profile descriptions in our study have carefully addressed the contexts which resemble a realistic nature of natural of a service usage for the respondents. The scenarios, together with the project partners with regard to the dimensions, attributes or the combination of the attributes and dimensions have been carefully written (see 2 examples in Appendix 1). The last and yet very important issue that must be addressed is the utility and part-worth in conjoint analysis. Utilities are simply numerical representations that express the value consumers place on each level. Part-Worth, on the other hand, means when multiple attributes come together to describe the total worth of the service or product concept, the utility values for the separate parts of the product (assigned to the multiple attributes) are part-worths.
different approaches in conjoint analysis: trade-off matrices (two factor-at-a-times), full profile (ratingsbased) card sort, self-explication approach, hybrid (ratings-based) conjoint and discrete choice modeling (choice-based). After an extensive review on the previous studies where the conjoint analysis was the research approach [7, 36], and conjoint related literatures [23, 28], we decided to use the full-profile conjoint approach. Full profile conjoint makes respondents give their idea on several product items, one at a time. In a full-profile conjoint analysis, normally, one level from each attribute is written on separate cards and respondents are asked to rate each concept or cards.
4.2. Defining Attributes and Levels of Attributes for the Conjoint Study The next step in conjoint study is designing the attributes and levels of attributes. To do so, experience in qualitative research is needed to develop the list of key attributes for any product or service. Moreover, too many attributes can greatly increase the burden on respondents. On the other hand, too few attributes can severely reduce the predictive capabilities of a model because some of the crucial features of a product or a service are missing from the model. Although, according to the new converged rich communication services (RCS), it was possible to define several attributes; however, we decided to address the following attributes and their levels in our study. We believe that the following five attributes and levels are the most important functionalities of the new converged rich communication services (see table 1). Table1. Service Functionalities, Attributes and the Levels of Attributes 1 2 Attributes
3 4 5
File Sharing Presence/Availability Switching between Media (Video, Voice and Text (IM) Switching between Devices (Mobile, PC and TV) Group Communications
Level 1 Yes Yes
Level 2 No No
Yes
No
Yes
No
Yes
No
4.3. Conjoint Profile Cards and Orthogonal Design
4.4. Sampling
Using full profile conjoint approach and depending on the number of attributes and levels, we will create several service profiles. Then, it will be a tedious task for respondents to be asked to rate each of the service profiles. Therefore, we need only to generate an orthogonal set of product profiles to complete the research project. Conjoint analysis constructs a series
In our study, the data was collected by making use of a web questionnaire or a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that was distributed in France, Spain and the Netherlands. The choices for paper (the printed version of the web questionnaire) or web questionnaire was based on opportunistic criteria: access to respondents on-line or in a group-meeting. The
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questionnaire was designed through informal discussion with partners collaborating in the Comesi project, such as France Telecom (Orange), and Spanish Telecom operator Teleponica. After the draft was completed, the questionnaire was pre-tested by experts to verify the accuracy of the questionnaire and to check for ambiguous expressions. Next an adjusted questionnaire was distributed among the respondents. The data are collected in May 2011, we have received 82 complete questionnaires. Although as in quasiexperiment [14], or in qualitative research [33], the representativeness of the sample of respondents for a conjoint analysis is not really important, we will give some background information on the people who filled out the questionnaire (see table 2).
On a total of 80 possible relations we found eight significant differences. This is a bit more than expected based on random error. Specifically, day-to-day routine (3x), enjoyment (2x) and usefulness of the service already available via the Internet (2x) showed differences, and this lead apparently to a different interpretations. So specifically the results for these three concepts have to be carefully considered, when the results of the conjoint analysis are discusses. Nevertheless, we can with some modesty conclude that the three samples do not differ in such a way that the samples cannot be combined for further analysis.
5. Result (Descriptive Results) Conjoint 3 received the highest score on likeliness to use, while conjoint 4 was the least likely to be used service. With regard to fit into day-to-day routines again conjoint 3 got the highest average score: the use of the service as described was very likely, while conjoint 2 and 4 scored on average the lowest values on likelihood. Furthermore, the results indicated that conjoint 3 was the most enjoyable service, while conjoint 4 was the least enjoyable service. Conjoint 3, focused on work and personal productivity, and it is apparently the far most attractive use case to the respondents.
Table 2. Respondents Background Information Handset Respondents Occupation Education Gander Age
Nokia: 21%
iPhone: 19%
HTC: 20%
BlackBerry: 13% French 33%
Ericsson: 9%
Samsung: 7%
Dutch 30%
Spanish Other 27% 10% Working in academia or student: 24% PhD: 10%
Telecom Other firms: Operator: 16% 59% Bachelor: Master: 60% 30% Male: 83% Female: 27% Between 22 and 70 years Average: 38 years
It is striking that most telephones can be considered to be smart phones. The next section provides a detailed discussion of our findings. In further analysis we will look if we can find differences among the respondents from France (N= 27), Spain (N = 22) and the Netherlands (N = 33). The core hypothesis is that there are no differences among respondents from France (group 1), Spain (group 2) and The Netherlands (group 3). To test this hypothesis we have run ANOVA. However, the samples are slightly different in size, so we also used the Games-Howell, assuming non-equal variance. We executed this analysis for every single question. In general we found only few significant differences between the answer patterns of the three groups of respondents (see table 3).
Table 4. Conjoint Related to Likelihood to Use, Fit into Day-to-Day Routine and Enjoyment Mean ( Standard deviation) Scale 1 to 7: very unlikely to very likely Conjoint 3 You are finalizing a task for work. Before sending the results to your boss, you want to get feedback from two colleagues.…...
Fit day-to-day routine Enjoyment Willingness to pay Would be more useful than services I already use on the Internet
Conjoint 2 F= 4.686, p
