I would suggest strong cultural personalization however, because in Greece for example if the boyfriend doesn’t insist on paying the call, it consists a break-up trigger!

There’s another service for global operators: communications savoir faire coaching for nomads.

Well, I think that current model is just a best effort solution to come up with offers with lush marketing without touching dinosaurian IT billing systems of operators. Correct me if I am wrong, but reforming IT billing is a min. 5 years project. Your options as a client change very often (less than a year period) but you always come up with the same bill at the end. Marketing isn’t supposed to change what you pay.

I’m in for the tests !

There are other people who possibly think I should be grateful for calling me or me calling them, and all they do is blablabla, sometimes for 10 min. long. They don’t care who pays, rather they just want to be heard. Fine. Pay for it.

And others, where there’s mutual value, a girlfriend/boyfriend chat maybe. And an early signal of a breakup would be that one party insists on paying for the call…

Anyway, interesting way of looking at things, Georgia (as usual). I think the current model is very profitable for operators, and easy to understand. There’s probably advantages to the latter. But to compete with other (free) mediums, perhaps such a business-model would be a killer. I can’t tell, would have to conduct some behavioral tests, but I definitely like this idea!

So if AT&T customer service calls you, or sends you an alert sms do you still pay? In fact, do they practice push customer service?

Hey, I still crunch competitors’ euros… In France and in Greece you don’t pay for receiving domestic calls. But we have roaming, to point out the difference in geographical analogies and the fact that we are in a very early stage of federalization as EU.

Is this the reason it works like this in the US?

Correct me if I’m wrong guys, but usually, in the US you get charged also if you get called or receive texts (otherwise, cingular tricked me quite nicely for quite some time…).

So you don’t really get to crunch competitors’ revenues