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How Device Intelligence Can Fuel Customer-Centric Decisions

by Nicolas Carré, Director of Product Management at Guavus, a Thales company

When I think about how mobile devices have evolved over the last few decades, it is difficult to remember a time before connected devices were everywhere. Without giving away my age, I can say that I vaguely remember when my flip phone was used simply for phone calls and the occasional text message (if I had the patience to repeatedly press the same key to get to the letter of the alphabet I needed). Remember that?

While the technology for those devices was complex enough for the time, it is no comparison to the technological sophistication of today’s smartphones, tablets, laptops and wearable tech; all of which connect to mobile networks and to one another. This increase in device variety and the number of network connections became a challenge for many mobile network operators (MNOs) to manage, particularly when device monitoring systems may not keep pace with the introduction of new devices with new capabilities, leading to a lack of visibility into device demographics.

Framing data to become intelligence

Turning raw data points into meaningful intelligence requires an understanding of your business strategy needs enterprise-wide. What are your network planners working on? What information do they need to build out the network? What about your network operations team? Are there day-to-day challenges they face in keeping the network running smoothly? Your product and marketing teams surely have product strategy and campaign plans in place. What are their plans?

Mobile device intelligence can help to refine and target the plans and strategies your organization has in place to grow your business. Ideally this intelligence can be shared across these domains through dashboards and downloadable reports that provide rich ad-hoc data exploration and analytics functions. Device intelligence can fuel strategies across multiple domains within your organization.

Network Planning

Mobile devices contain radio access data that indicate which radio frequency bands they are capable of connecting to. By understanding this data, your network planning teams can identify the intersection of connected device capabilities with a current or proposed network configuration. Ultimately, this intelligence can help planners avoid rolling out a network that only a few devices can connect to.

Network Operations

All mobile devices generate call detail records (CDR) with triplet key (IMSI, IMEI and MSISDN) data. One way that data can be transformed into intelligence is for identifying fraud patterns. For instance, when you notice that multiple SIM or eSIM connect to the network using the same IMEI at the same time, that indicates an anomaly which could lead to an IMEI cloning issue or a SIM box pattern. While NOC teams may not be certain that a suspicious pattern of usage is indeed fraudulent activity, they can quickly share this intelligence so that the fraud and security teams can begin an investigation.

Product and Marketing

Mobile device data that indicate device manufacturer, model, operating system or category can be valuable when you use it to provide intelligence about device adoption and churn. A distribution of this data can be used to understand adoption trends, see the previous device that was owned. When product and marketing teams know which device was abandoned and why (some devices change due to an upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone, while other changes are from one manufacturer or operating system to another, not to mention people simply upgrading to a 5G-capable device), they can run the right device adoption campaign offers to targeted subscribers – those who are most likely to engage with that offer based on the current device adoption trends happening on the network. These campaigns are more streamlined, efficient and can generate optimal results.

While we all enjoy the convenience that increased device capabilities provides us, as well as the convenience of always being connected, it’s easy to see how this explosion in devices and connections could overwhelm an MNO’s business operations. And without device analytics to properly frame the data, MNOs are further disabled by not being able to identify patterns that may be of interest and categorize the data into business intelligence.

Read more on Device Management Analytics:

To learn more about Guavus’ Device Management Analytics approach,  schedule a meeting with Guavus today.

Image attribution: iStock

About the Author

Nicolas Carre Guavus

Connect with Nicolas Carré

Nicolas Carré is the Director of Product Management leading the service and device analytics product lines at Guavus, a Thales company, and pioneer in AI-based big data analytics for MNOs.

Nicolas has spent more than 15 years in the telecom industry, mostly working with CSPs on customer-centric mobile service adoption and device trend analysis. The learning experience from addressing these challenges is Nicolas’ primary source of inspiration for designing analytics products that enable CSP business and operations teams with customer-centric solutions.

Prior to Guavus, Nicolas gained valuable experience as a Data Architect and was involved in building several startups from the ground up – including Neuralitic, Inc., which focused on mobile subscriber analytics and was acquired by Guavus in 2012.