Not heard so much in the UK, but popular in Spain, India and Latin America, ring back tones were once overlooked in Britain by the introduction of the iPhone and other data technology.
When someone calls you, you hear a ring tone, an easily changeable tone that comes from your phone. But when you are calling someone, you hear a ringback tone. This is usually a standard ‘ring ring’, i.e. a boring tone. In many countries, operators have provided subscribers with the option to replace the tone with “ringback music”. Typically, the same song is played for everyone who calls, or the end-user decides to assign different tones for specific callers. This service provides a great means for expression, especially in emerging market countries where social media is not yet widely available.
Making communications better with RBT
While RBT has been traditionally limited to music, the rise of smartphones and better networks will transform the technology in new ways to deliver new services. The most high-level way to see RBT is as an eight second audio signal preceding a conversation or a redirection to a voicemail. Eight seconds might not seem much but if you remember what Twitter was able to achieve with 140 characters, you might revisit this first assumption. The number of calls per day are staggering and most of them do not have an associated ringback. This untapped asset could soon be unleashed.
Thanks to numerous sensors, access to personal data (contacts, calendar) and background processing, your Android smartphone always knows where you are and what you are up to. This can be leveraged to customise your ringback tone to communicate information to your caller without hurting your privacy. As an example, when a caller is trying to reach you whilst in the car, they could learn from the ringback tone that you’re currently driving and not able to take the call. Knowing your habits, he might call you back after 20 minutes instead of leaving a voicemail. Another example, thanks to your calendar, the ringback tone could also alert callers that you’re not available now but that you will be free in 20 minutes. By pressing 1, they could receive a text letting them know that you are now free to talk. Those are two examples, showing how RBT can make life easier for the consumer by addressing their needs.
Expressing yourself through sports
While RBT has been limited to music, there is nothing preventing its use for sports. Sports fans are traditionally eager to find new ways of supporting their teams. If you’re a football fan, you could for instance sign up to your favourite football club so that whenever someone calls you before a match they hear your team’s football chant. RBT is such a large form of personalisation that it can be tweaked to any individual’s requirements to be used as they wish.
Using Ringback for business
Business corporations can also benefit from these advances by incorporating RBT into their portfolio. In a way that is not disturbing, callers trying to reach a company can receive information on the business that could prove useful to their call. This could be viewed as a missed opportunity which businesses could use as a marketing tool with a smaller cost, and edit the message regularly.
A new form of advertising
Businesses could also take the opportunity to reduce marketing costs by adding the RBT service to their employee’s business mobiles, and filling the airtime with messaging or advertising. This potential opportunity would need to be carried out in a way that does not disturb the end user and is used somewhere in which callers would expect to hear information about a company. To that extent, employee phones make total sense.
Gone are the days when RBT was just music. Ring back tones are paving the way forward for a new form of expression, a new way of making life easier and a new way of leveraging those 8 seconds of airtime before someone picks up the call. The most important factor of RBT is that it tells you something about the person you’re calling, and that’s what we will be seeing more of in the coming years.
By Florent Stroppa, General Manager Europe at OnMobile.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus