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The age of personalisation
Telecommunications has entered a new era – the age of personalisation. It started with the customisation of mobile ringtones some years ago. However, this was only a small taste of what is emerging now. The personalisation of voice and data communication in fixed and mobile networks has just begun. It includes a large variety of services from location-based services to personalised smart home applications. Sceptics might argue that personalisation has been an integral part of telecommunications since Bell designed the first operable telephone. What is more personal than a phone talk? However, until recently technology did not add much to this personal character of telecommunications. Even a mobile ringtone, downloaded by thousands of other people, is not really personal. It is just a customised setting, provided you have not created the mobile ringtone yourself. Real personalisation of communication technology requires something that has been largely missing so far: intelligent man-machine interaction. Up to now, communications technology has been relatively dumb. Your phone, mobile or fixed, does not know much about you and your communication and information needs in relation to the time-space context you are in. This will change with the next generation of communications devices. Your phone or the network will know, what clothes you like, where you can find the best offer in the vicinity to buy those clothes, what the price limit should be and what kind of garment ads you would like to receive. Intelligent personalisation offers a lot of opportunities for customers and service providers alike. Customers will get personalised information when they need it, and they will be able to treat their communication partners in a more differentiated, personalised way, which can really make life for everyone easier. Personalised settings for call handling will allow you to talk to the people when you are willing to do so without ignoring and embarrassing the others. Service providers, and I am especially talking about telcos here, will be able to sell more advanced services to their customers without increasing the complexity the customer has to face. On the contrary, personalised services serve the goal to make life easier for the user while at the same time increasing his or her information and communication options. Just think of navigation systems on your PDA. When you are in your car, you would prefer to have audio input and audio-visual output. When you get out of your car having a walk through the city, you might prefer some other combination of multimodal input and output, for example voice and pointer for input. The personalisation concept is an important milestone on the way to more user-friendly communications services that allow everyone to intuitively use the features her or she needs without having to do a degree in engineering. The only cloud in this bright picture could be the customer acceptance. To enable personalisation, services and devices have to store personal information about the user. As customers, especially in Europe, have grown very sensitive about privacy issues, customer acceptance of personalised services is nothing which service providers should take for granted. What is needed are solutions which enable customers to stay in control of their user data. Customers should be able to know, which user profiles are stored on the provider’s server and how long. I have no doubt that this is technically feasible, but the technical solution will not be enough to dispel the concerns of critical customers. What is needed in addition are marketing strategies which also cover informational self-determination and transparency of data collection besides the plentiful advantages personalised services offer. Personalisation will then be a driver of the telecoms market. Who will be the driver of personalisation? I believe the telcos. They have the customers and the infrastructure to do it, but most important, they have the need for innovative services in order to increase their revenues. The era of mass production is long gone. Let us embrace the age of personalisation and benefit from personalised communication services! Please send us your comments on this article. |
