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“Telcos are in a good position to be the drivers”
Maria Lorenza Demarie from Telecom Italia Lab is one of the leading European experts on personalisation in telecoms. In an exclusive interview with Eurescom mess@ge, Ms Demarie explains the challenges and opportunities, and why the telcos could be driving the market for personalised services. What does personalisation of services mean in the context of telecommunications? Personalisation technologies represent a very important response to the requirements of next-generation telecoms services. These services will provide the user ubiquitous reachability, easy navigation through voluminous content, and device-independent services, which exploit the multimedia capabilities and the bandwidth of advanced networks. The importance of personalisation is based on three current trends in telecoms technology. Firstly, content has become context- and location-sensitive and interactive. Then, devices are becoming smaller and more powerful. And finally, the different kinds of networks – telecommunication, Internet, TV and local area networks – are converging. The user is always connected to services and content, like in GPRS, UMTS and beyond the third generation. These trends characterise the increased mobility in our global society. Personalised services are a promising area for realising the potential created by new communications technologies. Personalisation permits to adapt a service in a specific context and to individual goals by providing a user a high quality product or service that he or she really needs and can use at best. In the context of telecommunications, service providers can be quite sure they are reaching specific users, they have also access to rich user profiles, and can leverage positioning information; these are important prerequisites to be able to personalise the offered services. In the long run personalisation in telecommunication means that users are constantly presented with the same personalised features, user interface customisation and services in whatever network and whatever terminal they may be located. The users must have the control over one or more user profiles, each connected to a specific context enabling the management of communications according to different situations or needs, being at work, in the car, or at home. General personalisation settings and service specific settings must be managed and the user must have the feeling that he is the reference point in the communication environment. Users do not like to tell telecoms systems their personal information several times. Users also don’t like that much of the information is not really used by the system, which often still tries to adapt the needs of the users to its predefined categories, instead of behaving exactly in the opposite way. A particular category of personalised services are content-based services where the telecommunication system selects content tailored to specific user preferences and needs. In this context, the demand for personalisation is high. This is due to three main factors. Firstly, services are mainly accessed through devices that have lim- ited interfaces. Secondly, the content the services convey to the user is very rich and diverse and, thus, needs to be filtered. Finally, the amount of time the user wants to spend dealing with a service can be very limited. What are the possible new personalised services? There are two main service areas: content-based services and communication services. Let me start with the content based services. Imagine you ask for a map of the surrounding area near your position along with an indication of the open restaurants; if you are in the centre of a big city, you will probably end up with a map fully covered by restaurants. If you are vegetarian or you like only the local cuisine or you tend to prefer inexpensive dishes, most of the restaurants displayed tend to waste your navigation time. You have to go through the details of all the restaurants in the list in order to find what you like. A personalised map would show only the restaurants tailored to your habits and possibly a way to show/hide all the other restaurants or to explicitly filter them. Imagine a tourist information service and you visiting an arts museum in Paris. At the museum you want to consult an electronic museum guide, and the guide is enabled to communicate with your personal profile manager that you always carry with you in your mobile phone. The guide discovers that you are Italian and configures its language to Italian. The guide also discovers your interest in impressionism and provides you with a list of exhibited impressionist art at the museum. Discovering the impressive collection, you check with your mobile phone to see if your husband/wife is available. You call him/her and asks him/her to join you through an audio/video connection. The service discovers the bandwidth demand of the desired connection and maximises the use of the available bandwidth thanks to the museum WLAN. Here is an example for communication services. The service is a sort of virtual workshop among different participants on a network of distributed and quite different machines – fixed and mobile terminals. Each participant should be able to personalise the way he or she employs for interaction, depending on the terminal he or she uses and the user preferences. Every participant will have a different experience of the workshop, but anyone could participate independently of the terminal and the subscribed services. How will the market for personalised services develop? There are two main factors that will influence the market development of personalised services. The first factor is demand. Does the interaction context require personalisation? The second factor is information. Are there sufficient data available about the user, the service context and the content, which will allow successful personalisation? Providing an answer to both these questions is not easy. Explicit personalisation can be an acceptable solution for many communication services, like the virtual workshop example I mentioned, but can have limited effect in other cases, like in push information services, where the system has to select the right information among different possible choices all acceptable using explicit information available. In other situations the use of explicit information is not applicable because of the bandwidth, terminal settings, technicalities involved. Moreover, explicit information has the drawback of requiring the user to state what personalisation has to do, and the user interface has to be more complex in order to allow entering the additional inputs needed by explicit personalisation. Against these limitations it can be expected that, at least in the beginning, new services will proliferate in the market without automatic personalisation or with very limited and proven personalisation features. What will distinguish a service from another will be the ease of use, the usefulness of the service with respect to the context in which it is proposed, the value of the content and the price. In a second phase, personalised services will be able to leverage the past usage data to devise personalisation features, which will improve the user's experience. Users will then have to spend less time to find the content they want, with less additional inputs. Who will be the main driver of personalisation services – the telcos, the software providers, or the manufacturers? Software providers tried to be the driver of personalisation services in the internet world, but this position led to many failures. In personalisation, technology is only an enabler, not at all the solution, and if overestimated it could create real problems, due to unfulfilled expectations. Telcos are in a good position to be the drivers because they own the user profiles, interaction histories and permissions to use them all. Telcos have also a privileged relationship with their customers who usually contact them for any need and problem they experience with the services. Having data and the possibility to understand customer needs is a very good starting point to design and deploy successful personalised services, so I think that only telcos could be the drivers of them. What services is your company planning to offer its customers in the area of personalisation? At the research division of Telecom Italia we are studying the exploitation of the potential of new mobile communication technologies and devices for the benefit of new mobile services. I am not in the position to give precise information on new services, which will be marketed by the fixed and mobile operators. However, I know that a lot of interest is focused on location-based services and push information services in the mobile area and on broadband and TV services in the fixed network area. How are socio-political issues, like privacy, to be considered in order to reach mass market acceptance for new personalised services? The main important issue is privacy considered in a quite broad sense. Users should trust their telecommunication service providers. In order to achieve this goal it is important that customers always know, which information the service provider has collected about them. Moreover, customers must always perceive the benefits of the data they give to the service provider in terms of the personalisation they obtain in return. It is frustrating for them to see that the information they give is transformed in poor personalisation or in nothing at all. Users have to exercise a complete control of their profile in any moment and should be able to change attributes, “reset” all their interaction histories, revoke permissions, confirm or not a user model, etc. Several studies demonstrate that under these conditions the majority of users, around 80-90 percent, are happy to give their personal data to service providers. Which personalised services would you yourself like to have in the near future? I would definitely be a good consumer of personalised services, mainly because I am lazy and usually I run easily out of time. In general, I would like push information services, carefully selected according to my profile and my dynamically changing interests, devices and context. I would like this kind of service to recognise when I am in the car and use the appropriate conversion, for example text to speech. I would also like to share my navigation profile between the fixed Internet and the mobile Internet in order to avoid entering my preferences, bookmarks several times. I would like to have push and pull location-based services. What I would especially appreciate is to be notified about special offers of my preferred goods in the vicinity. The interview was conducted by Milon Gupta. Please send us your comments on this article. |
