Some days the world conspires against me. One piece of bad news is compounded by other unwelcome developments. My football team always loses on those days. My toast always falls jam side down. My car will be stuck in a snowdrift and while I'm fetching a shovel will be given a parking ticket by a traffic warden with a grimace that might be misinterpreted as a smile.

One solution to days like that is physical comfort therapy - eat, drink and be merry. Another is to offer some good news to balance the bad news. Everyone likes good news. Sunshine quickly relieves the shadows. Retailers are expert at convincing their customers that they are always getting better value. Cut-price offers at silly low prices are advertised and sold in the most prominent places. Shoppers then are more likely to spend freely on the high-margin products further back in the store. Customers with a grievance are more likely to lose the intensity of their complaint.

Communication service providers are acutely exposed to the full range of customer emotion. Offering technology based services for mass consumption inevitably leads to faults and failures from time to time. The perfect technology has yet to be invented; as a general rule, the more flexible and advanced a technology becomes, the less likely it is to be stable and predictable.

Naturally, customers don't see it this way. Handsets crashing, reception black spots, cell contention, network and software failures and all the other possible problems in the complex chain of providing communication services are not their problem. They buy an advertised service and expect it to work.

As with all commercial services, money is a further dimension. Most people find paying for things unpleasant. A survey asking whether people enjoy paying their mobile phone bill is unlikely to have interesting results. However, most people seldom think about their tariffs for long-term regular services such as utilities and communications. After a brief flurry of activity when searching for supply, attention turns to the more interesting matters of the day, like football results. Costs of the services are incurred and endured as a sort of low grade background pain, which only occasionally becomes intense enough to justify action.

Service providers therefore have an awkward choice. They can say nothing about tariffs and bills unless either a customer complains about a bill or they are promoting a cut-price offer. After all, there is no point in drawing the customer's attention to something which will make them grumpy.

Or the service provider can try to spin a good news story about what a good deal the customer is getting. Customer satisfaction would increase, according to this view, because they would think warmly about the provider and not look too closely at the detail to see whether they really are getting a good deal. Such is the path to despair and ruin. Customers will not be fooled; at least they will not continue to be fooled over a sustained period.

The brutal fact is that many customers get a bad deal. Perhaps they originally were sold the wrong tariff for their needs. Or their needs have changed and the tariff which suited them at the outset is now costing far more than it should. Compounding the general confusion about the cost of services and what tariff options are available, many of the so-called good news stories would actually be spinning a web of lies.

Add this to the fact that some contact points with the customer are not conducted under ideal conditions, perhaps because something in the supply chain has gone wrong or the customer is in bill shock. Customers who have dropped their toast jam side down in the morning, been thwarted by dodgy network coverage and are dismayed by the unexpectedly high cost of their recent bill are unlikely to be receptive to weak or misleading messages. A genuine piece of good news is required.

While providers are obviously not responsible for promoting general happiness and mental wellbeing across society, it is in their own interest to ensure that their customers feel they are being treated fairly, with reasonable attention to their personal needs, and are getting good value for money. This key point is well understood and will not be laboured further here. So how can providers bridge the gap between wanting to give their customers something to smile about, while building the trust that is essential to a profitable long-term relationship?

Following the style of retailers, service providers could make special offers - spend more and you will save lots! This is a well-used technique, but take-up is often limited by two key factors for those customers who do not already have a warm and happy feeling about the service provider.

First, asking someone to spend more when they are already uncomfortable with the amount they are already spending is a bit like giving them a dead leg and then offering to sell them an ice cream to take their mind off it.

Second, although some people find spending therapy a good way to dispel the parking ticket blues, or whatever is the problem du jour, the majority will disregard the offer and there will be little goodwill involved from those who do take it up. Up-selling is best done from a position of goodwill, so there is little long-term benefit.

Further, cut-price offers over time tend to devalue the services provided, and accelerate the drive towards commoditisation. The fabled 'race to the bottom'.

Nurturing the customer relationship is the key to success. We all know that. The trick is finding how, in ways that don't involve significant dilution of revenue and are sustainable.

The answer which pops out is the expected one - make sure that customers are using the tariff which meets their current needs, and tell them about it at suitable intervals. Customers complain when the first and only time they hear from their service provider is at contract renewal time, or when they feel bombarded by marketing messages. They generally don't complain when their service provider offers to reduce their bill.

It seems simple - just offer customers a fair deal at regular intervals. No need to discount, launch offers with great headlines and even greater hidden costs or expensive advertising campaigns. Spend the money instead on offering all customers the right product for their needs from the published list. Any revenue dilution will be recouped in spades.

Moving customer relationships from a position of entrenched suspicion to one of mutual trust is ambitious, but even if only partly achieved would transform the dynamics of the market. The cornerstone of trust is that customers believe the service provider is always offering a fair deal and is not exploiting them.

Trust is fostered by transparency, honesty and proactive care. Conversely, it is destroyed by secrecy, obfuscation and lack of positive contact. For communication service providers, the prize is to have loyal customers who will be open to move up the value chain. The fear is that revenue will dilute by choosing not to exploit overpaying customers who don't complain about their current deal, whether through inattention, complacency or inertia.

So why is tariff advice worth doing? Because it can play a major part in shifting customer relationships from suspicion to trust. Bad news days will no longer represent a vital threat to the customer relationship. A reservoir of goodwill will absorb the occasional failure to deliver a perfect experience.

But, but, but... what about revenue dilution, reliability of the tariff advice and effect on up-selling? All interesting topics, which I'll touch on in the next few posts.

Ask anyone whether they understand mobile communication tariffs and you're likely to receive a mumble in return. It's not that people are completely clueless, just that most know that their notion of 'more minutes for more money' is not quite the full story.

To be fair, this is not a problem unique to mobile telecoms. As the glam kid of the class, mobile is singled out because people think about it more than fixed line or broadband. It's viewed more as a personal service than as a utility. Perhaps not quite cute and cuddly, but at least imbued with some flexibility and personality, unlike its grey sibling landline services.

Mobile also has one other important distinction - the risk of bill shock. It is possible to run up an eye-watering bill with a landline phone, but you have to try quite hard or be unlucky. Calling Mongolia, failing to properly disconnect the call and waiting for a few days would do it. But in the main mobile is where the high potential for misunderstanding occurs.

Let's say I want to save some money on car insurance, so ask for a few competing quotes. Insurance companies helpfully provide 'freefone' numbers to entice prospective customers to speak to them. After phoning round and receiving 4 quotes, I pick the cheapest and save myself £30. Ok, it took 90 minutes on the phone but thirty quid ain't bad. Problem is, more than half (£16.20) of my saving is wiped out by my mobile phone bill for those 4 calls! In that case why not call them 'pay through the nose fone' numbers?

In simple terms the problem is advice of charge. Consumers of communication services typically don't know how much a service will cost before they use it.

It has been this way ever since automated exchanges did away with the human interface of the operator connecting calls. The number you dial determines how much you will be charged. If there were, say, 3 types of call and the way to invoke each call type were different, then it would be reasonable to assume that people could memorise the costs and there would be no surprises come the day when the bill flutters softly on to the front doormat.

But we know that there are many types of call, all initiated in the same way and only distinguished by the pattern of numbers tapped into the device. If one call costs nothing because it begins with 02, and another costs £0.18 per minute because it begins with 08, and yet another costs £0.30 per minute because it beings with 070, how is the average consumer expected to know? Yes, all call rates are published on websites and in documents exchanged with the customer when they sign up, but how many study and understand these documents even if they have taken the trouble to locate them in the first place?

The usual retail experience is so different. As we are enticed to buy seductively packaged goods, prices scream out at us that we're saving, getting best value, more for less. It's almost impossible not to know how much something is going to cost because it's clearly labelled.

One solution might be to introduce a prefix which provides an audible advice of charge before the call connection is made. For example, keying 111 before the destination number would allow the caller to hear the unit cost and any call banding. It would be interesting to see how much such a feature would be used.

All this before we've touched on roaming, which is a notable example of free market failure and should probably be left as a topic for another time.

It all leads to distrust of providers by consumers. The uncertainty of call costs inhibits take-up of additional services and contributes to worsen supplier-buyer relationships.

In an attempt to simplify the market providers have come up with the notion of 'bundles', which include an allowance of commonly used services for a flat monthly fee. There is no doubt that this concept is widely understood. Bundled services are usually built up at discounted rates, so that a service which would normally cost £0.08 per minute would cost £0.05 per minute if the whole bundle allowance is used.

Unfortunately, although bundles have been generally accepted and enabled limited up-selling of services, they also raise complications. A simple 500 minute per month bundle for £25 is only a good financial deal for the consumer if the minutes actually consumed would have cost more to buy outside the bundle. The issue of right-sizing appears, where the balance between buying the slightly cheaper bundle must be balanced against the likelihood that some of those bundled services may not be consumed.

Right-sizing is further complicated by several additional factors. Only certain specific services are included within the bundle. In a way this goes back to the advice of charge problem above. How does a consumer know that the destination being tapped on to the keypad is in or out of the bundle which has already been paid for? Some services and destinations are allocated separate allowances, thus fragmenting the bundle and making it harder to work out which benefits are most needed. Further options to nominate particular destinations, such as 'friends and family' numbers, make it harder to work out how much bundle is needed, because these destinations now must be subtracted from the total usage of those service to right-size the customer. Some bundle benefits carry over between months, other expire at the end of the month.

What started out looking like a simple problem has become by stages rather complicated. Only the geekiest of consumers actually bothers to probe this murky world and attempt to work out the true benefit.

Now wouldn't it be nice if providers could right-size their customers, or trusted third parties right-size for customers not currently in a contract?

What about the original question, of why mobile tariffs are so complicated? That is, not explaining the complications but discussing the motivation for making them so. Is there a simple answer? Is the moon made of blue cheese (just think of the energy content if it was)? Such a discussion deserves an article of its own and should be a cracker.

Hello, I'm Peter McClelland, CEO of StreamFlex Solutions. Back in 2002 when I co-founded the company, I had no idea what tariff optimisation was, let alone that I would become closely involved with it. The idea behind the company was a general-purpose bulk processing software platform, which would transform the speed and flexibility for providing large-scale applications. So often I had seen business problems which could have been solved if only better software tools had been available. Systems were typically inflexible and closely encircled by a latter day Varangian guard of the IT citadel, whose main task seemed to be to prevent any real improvements ever being made. You probably know the score - death by a thousand review meetings.

So how did StreamFlex end up being tariff optimisation experts? And why does the world need yet another blog?

Well, once the flexible bulk processing platform - StreamFlex - had taken shape, the next task was to convince some telcos to use it. That proved somewhat harder than developing the software, because of course they all wanted direct solutions to specific problems. Any marketing neophyte could have told me that!

Actually, it was not all bleak. Quite a few telcos were interested and saw some potential. We wrote several pilot applications. After a while it became clear that the drive to keep existing customers, get more new customers and shape the most interesting offers was a key battleground for telecom providers. It was a market barely served by incumbent software vendors. Our pilot applications grew until they became three packaged software solutions.

In the course of working with large and small operators and their channel partners, we explored the topography of this interesting new field. It was not CRM, not billing, not marketing. It was, and is, a hybrid. A bit like making a pie, using a mixture which demands various inputs and adds an extra secret sauce to make it tasty.

At the same time as realising that software solutions to help providers get, keep and grow their customer base was a distinct and needy market, we also knew well that we could not address all of it. Niche suppliers usually build the best businesses, and despite having a general-purpose software tool, it was clear that we would be better off becoming specialists. At least until we had the strength to market the general-purpose tools on their own. Luckily, a clear market need emerged, for telecom providers to advise their customers and prospects of which of the available offers would best suit their current and future needs.

Software is hard to describe. That's the subject for a blog or two in its own right. A shared vocabulary is essential, if everyone involved with the business and software solution are to usefully describe what is needed and what should be provided. This new type of specialist solution needed a name. It is marketed for telecom providers, so we called it 'tariff optimization'. It finds the best (optimal) tariff (offer) for each customer, depending on its needs, in a wide range of situations.

In future posts I'll explore these areas in some detail, examining why tariff optimization should be of interest to telecom providers, how it works, what it must involve to be successful, and quite a lot of random stuff I just happen to feel is interesting!

And so on the final question, of why I can justify adding yet another quantum of noise to the clamour of the blogosphere. Partly because tariff optimisation is not yet mainstream and I would like to explain how I understand it in an informal and, hopefully, at least slightly entertaining way. Partly because it's inherently interesting. And partly because I want to sell more software because the benefits of tariff optimisation become more widely recognised!

But also a little bit because I find most software industry PR to be offensively turgid, dull and uninformative. We can do better at explaining what we do and why it's important and I hope to prove that, without ever making a sales pitch. Not even once. Promise.