Light Reading Webinar
May 23rd, 2007
Simplifying the Customer Experience Using Identity Management
We are following up on the session with an informative Q & A to address some of the areas you have highlighted during the webinar.
The mobile market is competitive and complex. On the one hand, operators want to mitigate churn and achieve ARPU growth whether it is by increasing up-sell and cross-sell opportunities or by providing a wide array of service options that address anticipated market segments. Subscribers, on the other hand, want a personal experience that is highly relevant (contextual), smart and seamlessly integrated across the full mobile-internet experience i.e. the mobile experience should integrate a subscriber’s digital personality.
The majority of today’s Internet applications including web browsing, communications (such as email and Instant Messaging), business tools (workplace IM), and social networking (Facebook and YouTube), all bi-directionally personalize the user experience.
1. What is Identity Management and Personalization?
The service experience is personalized when it is tailored to the subscriber through, for example, knowing their identity, preferences, likes/dislikes, relationship with others and current context such as location or content being browsed, the application being used, etc. Personalization is therefore about making the service as relevant as possible for the subscriber and more specifically Redknee defines this further as reflecting the subscriber’s Digital Personality with Mobile Web 2.0 technologies.
2. What is a Personalization solution?
Personalization for Redknee means offering subscribers the freedom to control their preferences. These include preferences for privacy, permissions, identity, availability, location, presence, call-handling, opt-ins, opt-outs, notifications, and memberships (contacts, buddies, groups). The Redknee Unified Profile Server (UPS) anchors the Redknee Personalization portfolio. UPS provides a single point of access and control to the user profile data required for the Personalization of services.
3. Why is there a need to manage the subscriber experience?
As personalized services for wireless communications grows in popularity, privacy threats such as: spam, cookies, and tracking user location are of imminent concern. Subscribers are receiving an exponential number of applications and services marketed to them, all of which are directly sent to their mobile without their permission. They are afraid of services eating up their prepaid minutes without their permission, receiving viruses or identity theft of personal information. Mobile users are deterred from subscribing to personalized services such as Location-based Services (LBS) unless their privacy concerns are addressed and protected.
With UPS, not only can operators define specific privacy policies for network enablers such as Presence and LBS, but it also empowers users to decide which applications and which users can access their personal data. UPS delivers strictly defined Privacy Management through:
- Personalization
- Availability Management
- User privacy decisions
- The central profile solution
- Opt-in control
- Group management capability
Removing these barriers paves the way for the adoption of next generation user centric mobile services with privacy management.
4. How does personalization increase the quality of the subscriber experience?
Not only do subscribers decide who sees if they are online, but also what services they prefer receiving, time of day, and their availability. This gives users greater flexibility in managing their services and communication capabilities while addressing their privacy concerns. For example, Phillip wishes to communicate with his management via video, voice, and email on his mobile and only IM with co-workers on his desktop computer, but in the evening he prefers that only his friends know he is online and only available via IM. UPS’s Presence and Availability Management span multiple communication systems that drive the adoption of a rich set of applications and services, giving operators a distinctive edge on personalization.
More often than not, subscribers are bombarded with irrelevant services and promotions. But by opting out due to frustration, they pass up on mobile services that can improve their day-to-day life, such as pertinent traffic information or access to personally interesting marketing offers. The key differentiator in today’s market is the experience. Move away from the blur of infinite product offerings and give subscribers a memorable, rich experience by allowing them to customize all their mobile services. Redknee will personalize your mobile communications experience in the same way that Apple did for mobile music, TiVO did for television, and Amazon did for books.
Yes, mainly because we see them as ‘owning’ the digital personality. They have become the trusted party of the subscriber with access to preference, location and privacy controls and already operate on a partnership basis with third parties. Mobile operators have already become identity providers for services including voice, messaging, internet access, ringtone/wallpaper/game downloads, and more. As mobile devices continue to grow in functionality, integration and usability, they will increasingly be relied upon as the centre of the subscriber’s Internet experience; for example the quicker, easier, real-time use of social networks integrated with communication, messaging, browsing, address books and other on-device on-network integrated services.
Mobile content and applications work best when the operator makes them instantly available to the customer. However, mobile manufacturer’s today struggle to make it easy to integrate the variety of services available with the existing device capabilities. The operator can add value by driving the device manufacturers to make it simpler, integrating into the rest of the device (I share a photo from within the address book, or add to my favourite photo-sharing tool.
A third party mobile device client will only achieve significant traction if it is deeply integrated into the device – use the same address book, messages, calendar, photo store but also open the application from within all those other places; Internet browsers allow third party icons and menu items to be added into the experience so you can start the particular service quickly, easily, and intuitively. Example 1: If you click on a photo and add it to Flickr or Facebook, instead of opening the application, finding upload, finding photo, and pressing complete. Example 2: If a Presence application could be initiated from the ‘Call’ button on the device or opened from within the calendar or address book, it would be far easier and intuitive to use as a call (session) and personal-details manager.
6. Is 'Policy' more than just allocating bandwidth? If so, how do you handle this?
A Policy is a specific decision based on a set of criteria that influences the behaviour of a transaction, event or session. A Policy may therefore be a Privacy decision (application usage, peer-peer sharing), allocation of network resources (bearer, bandwidth, class), specific charging method (stream/event/volume, identifier) and the ability to provide specific material for that session. Redknee have initially focused on Privacy policies as the toughest issue today but with the ability to support the broadest definition and technology for policy control.
Typical profile data accessible via UPS include presence and availability, location, contact/group definitions, segmentation (e.g. youth or minor user class for control of adult content filtering) and privacy. Privacy control allows the user to control access to their profile data by services, other users and content partners.
UPS protects privacy concerns, allowing users to retain control over their wireless identity and have a higher comfort level with trying and using new mobile services more often. Eliminating this usage barrier, UPS paves the way for adoption of next generation wireless data services, while addressing current legal and future regulatory requirements.
7. What regulatory drivers do you see or anticipate?
There is a much greater legal and regulatory demand on operators that is not prevalent over ISPs – other than basic privacy of personal data covered in terms and conditions. The operators (fixed, cable, mobile, tv) are still seen as a public service granted a license to provide very high quality service and in that sense they are under more intense scrutiny. A few examples of laws, directives, regulations and codes of conduct are:
European Commission Directives
Directive 95/46/EC covers the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.
Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (Directive on privacy and electronic communications)
HIPAA US Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act
Privacy Regulation
Security Standard
Transactions and Code Set Standards
Identifier Standard
One Hundred Third Congress of the United States of America
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) covers the ability to offer Legal Intercept to the US authorities and includes provision for mis-abuse.
The UK’s Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS)
The Eleventh Code of Practice is an industry code of conduct protecting premium services and has the power to fine companies and bar access to services.
The UK’s Independent Mobile Classification Body (IMCB)
IMCB Guide and Classification Framework is a code of conduct agreed between the UK mobile operators for managing access to adult content.
There are also specific telecommunications regulators in every national market (UK’s Ofcom, Canadian CRTC, France’s ART, Germany’s REGTP, the US FCC, and so on).
The advantage is that it actually means that the operator can continue to tightly integrate the applications and the network infrastructure; Location and Presence are the most obvious because even if a subscriber perceives that a Location service is provided entirely by a third party, the operator is still on the hook if that subscriber’s location is incorrectly shared. In other words, the operator cannot expect to shirk their responsibility to a third party service and has to remain in the service experience loop. As service personalization continues to grow, this legal and regulatory compliance will continue to influence the operators. For example, customers do complain to the mobile network provider for Internet content outside of their control. Parental control is one example here.
8. Do you see Identity Management playing a role in business segments?
Business professionals are frequently power users of PC based applications, Internet tools (e.g. Salesforce.com) and high revenue generating mobile subscribers. Mobile operators have already added value to this market segment through services such as Blackberry to make mobile solutions as productive as possible. Again, the issue is the level of integration across sets of applications and making the services as relevant as possible whilst at the same time secure. For example, sharing availability across enterprises would solve one of the biggest issues – voicemail tag. The mobile operator is in the ideal position to federate trusted sharing of personal information across multiple enterprises from contact information to availability to accessing business tools. Location is one example that can be integrated with numerous business services.
More advanced business logic can be applied by knowing more about the business user; if it is possible to detect they are driving (quick location change, headset being used, appointment setting in their diary, etc) then a different behaviour can be controlled such as informing callers in advance or diverting to voicemail; particularly regions in which laws have governed people not to utilize their handset while driving, but also those times when an employee needs to provide a comprehensive answer to a colleagues or customers questions. Another example would be the ability for operators to differentiate their charging and billing based on whether a subscriber is making business or personal calls which would be defined upon a distinct set of characteristics i.e. contact network, location, and time.
Infuse your marketing strategy with a powerful reward-based opt-in capability that forms new operator/partner revenue sharing opportunities. Privacy Control and Profile Management creates an effective combination that attracts partnering vendors and allows them to create targeted campaigns based on the user profiles of a loyal subscriber base. For example, Phillip receives a message that offers extra airtime in exchange for promotions from the cinema. He opts-in and the next time Phillip passes a theatre, he receives a coupon. Captivate your subscribers with a personalized rewards experience and watch your revenues grow.
Redknee’s UPS solution brings reality to the next generation of personalized services, positioning mobile network operators to increase their value of each subscriber, resulting in increased profitability and decreased churn. UPS enables operators to put subscribers at the center of the service strategy – everything that a subscriber has done to date, helps improve their service experience in a real-time fashion, while protecting their privacy and allowing permissive marketing.
Redknee’s UPS helps operators build user confidence, boosting usage of value-added services through personalization. By federating a subscriber’s permissions and identity across the network into one easy to manage spot, UPS enables operators to act as a trusted and secure broker to add value to third party enterprises and affiliate services by sharing information in a secure and permissive fashion.
IMS enables the use of regular standardized interfaces between network elements and the service/application layer promising quicker and easier application integration. Identity management and personalization can be delivered with or without IMS, but the same issues of privacy and control still exist.
Redknee’s Unified Profile Server transforms your mobile experience with the ultimate in personalization. Subscribers now have the flexibility to personalize services and preferences, opening up a world of new service opportunities that rapidly drive usage, adoption and significant new revenues.
To find out more about the Redknee Unified Profile Server and how we can increase the value to the Subscriber experience please click here.
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