By combining contextual information with a person’s preferences in certain circumstances, a service provider can offer choices that are relevant to a person’s situation and inclination.

While contextual information (identity, presence, location, the weather, history of prior calls, visits to websites or purchases, etc.) is valuable, it is not the only way to understand consumers’ needs. The most direct way is to simply ask about a person’s preferences and then create a mechanism that can store this information as a “profile” allowing for selective services exposure.

By proposing actions to the consumer, a service provider can take on a more active role, make it easier to introduce new services and improve the user experience.
 
Context + preferences = relevance
 
By combining contextual information about a person’s environment with the preferences regarding what choices this person is likely to make in certain circumstances, a service provider can offer choices that are relevant to a person’s situation and inclination. Consumers benefit with a reduction in the flow of offers cluttering their inboxes, and a reduction or elimination of usage costs via advertising and sponsorships.

By using “context + preferences = relevance,” service providers can make timely, targeted offers that are more likely to be of genuine value to the consumer and thus more likely to be acted upon.

The relevance mechanism also allows advertisers to reach highly-interested consumers who are more likely to pay attention, more likely to buy, and less likely to be annoyed into the arms of a competitor. Targeted advertising is gold for advertisers and means that the service provider can charge a good price.  Alternatively, by taking and improving on a widely-used internet marketing technique, targeted advertising revenues might even justify offering the service to consumers for free.

The main idea is that by combining context with preferences it is possible to offer choices relevant to consumers’ changing situations and desires. This supports the two-sided business model of generating revenues for carriers from both subscribers (ARPU) and service providers (advertisers, web service providers, retailers, etc.). Perhaps most importantly, this approach leverages key capabilities of telecom networks, including IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), to deliver value to consumers, provide rich communications services and new ways to monetize them, and build an offering that can compete effectively with the free services of the internet.

By Marc LeClerc

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