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Ep 43 – Telco’s Pinball Wizard: Neil McRae
BT Chief Architect Neil McRae talks about the company's digital transformation and strategies for working with hyperscalers … and pinball, of course!
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Ep 38 – What's Up with Totogi? The Future of Charging
This week’s guest
Hakan Dursun
Chief Marketing Officer TotogiWe get a lot of questions about Totogi, but the top one has to be, “Why charging?” Nothing new has happened in charging in decades; even Ericsson and Huawei give it away for free when they bundle it with their network kit. But with the widespread availability of the public cloud, coupled with best-in-class data tools, there’s a great opportunity for awesome innovation in the areas of charging and rating.
For this episode in the “What’s up with Totogi?” series, I decided to bring Totogi CMO Hakan Dursun on the podcast to tell the Totogi story. Hakan and I break down why creating plans is so hard for telcos, what CMOs wish they could do, and how Totogi is reinventing how telcos think about charging.
Hit play to hear our conversation about:
- Why the existing plan design process in telco is terrible [05:11];
- What got Hakan so excited about Totogi [8:57];
- How Totogi can help CMOs deliver personalized plans to EVERY subscriber – in hours and days, instead of months and years [11:18];
- What makes Totogi’s API-based, pay-by-the-use system a game changer for telcos (double your ARPU, anyone?) [12:38].
CMOs can’t believe how easy it is to use the Totogi system. Want to give it a try? Join our upcoming webinar.
Links and Resources
- You can find the transcript for this episode here.
- Sign up for our upcoming webinar to start your journey to the future of charging.
- Check out the Totogi website
- Set up a meeting with the Totogi team
- Listen to Telco in 20 podcast episode 15, Totogi: the new ant at the picnic
- Read my Twitter thread on why telco charging is NOT a commodity
- Check out the lyrics to Skee-Lo’s 1995 hit, I Wish
- Watch the unforgettable “you had me at hello” scene from the movie Jerry Maguire
Author’s bio
With more than 20 years of experience, Hakan has helped transform and grow many telcos around the world. He has top management consulting experience with Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen, and Delta Partners, and has worked in the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He has held executive positions at British Telecom and Türk Telekom, most recently serving as Türk Telekom CMO, where he managed a $5 billion P&L with 45-million subscribers.
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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.
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Podcast Credits
- Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios Royston, TelcoDR
- Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
- Editor/Producer: Alisa Jenkins Wilson, Springboard Marketing
- Audio Editing: Andrew Condell
- Music: Dyami Wilson
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is Totogi focused on charging when everyone says charging is a commodity?
Danielle Rios argues that charging only feels like a commodity because telcos are stuck doing it the old way. With public cloud infrastructure and best-in-class AI and machine learning tools now widely available, there’s a massive untapped opportunity to reinvent charging. Telcos can use it as a lever to reduce churn, grow ARPU, and deepen customer engagement. Learn more at the Totogi website.
2. What makes plan design so painful for telco CMOs today?
Even the simplest new plan can take months to launch—a bundle with Netflix or Spotify can take five to six months. Every change requires going back to IT, creating an almost endless ping-pong match between marketing and IT. Vendors’ upgrade cycles can halt business activities entirely. Meanwhile, despite thousands of available plans in the market, 90% of subscribers end up using just 10% of them.
3. What do telco CMOs wish they could do?
CMOs dream of getting plans to market in days instead of months, designing bundles with OTTs quickly, benchmarking top-performing telcos in other markets, and—most ambitiously—building truly personalized plans for every single subscriber. The challenge is that subscribers don’t know what they want, and manually designing millions of individualized plans is impossible with today’s tools.
4. How does Totogi deliver hyper-personalization at scale?
Totogi’s charging system uses AI and machine learning—the same technology battle-tested by the world’s leading tech companies—to algorithmically detect which subscribers are likely to churn, which could spend more, and which plan would best fit each individual. Recommendations are generated in minutes and can be implemented automatically via API with no IT involvement.
5. Does marketing still need IT to implement plan changes with Totogi?
No—and that’s a core part of Totogi’s design. Danielle Rios and her team built the system so marketing teams can create and deploy plans themselves, without going through IT. Plans can be dynamically offered to subscribers across any channel—mobile app, website, retail kiosk, or call center—automatically and instantly.
6. Could Totogi really help telcos double their ARPU?
DR believes it’s possible, and Totogi’s leadership agrees. By replacing broad, static plan designs with algorithmically generated, hyper-personalized offers—delivered automatically at the moment of highest relevance—telcos can intercept churn, capture upsell opportunities, and grow revenue in ways that today’s commodity chargers don’t support. Connect with the Totogi team to explore what’s possible.