Enabling Location-based Services to Drive Business

Enabling Location-based Services to Drive Business Providing insight on customer movement and behavior can enable next-generation mobile service delivery capable of growing revenues, improving brand awareness and increasing customer loyalty

INTRODUCTION TO LBS The latest advancements in location-based services (LBS) are bringing about major improvements in the accuracy, the reliability and the types of services delivered to consumers and businesses. Due to these advances, LBS are increasingly being deployed in mission-critical applications such as E911 caller location.

Mobile service providers can also boost revenues and benefit from the broad range of potential commercial applications with LBS. Faced with an ever increasing threat from ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) services, service providers need to continuously explore new ways to generate income from their existing network infrastructure. LBS plays a significant role in this strategy.

LBS IS THE RIGHT CHOICE, RIGHT NOW Initial LBS were based on satellite navigation, more commonly known as GPS, with the required technology integrated into the mobile device or smartphone itself. Despite being seen as the gold standard for LBS, GPS has always had issues in both heavily developed areas and indoor environments as surface reflections and poor line of sight often cause accuracy problems.

These shortcomings have driven increased need for geo-location of mobile customers and their devices. Increases in data usage mean that operators are deploying more cell sites, including Femtocells; this means that there is now an increased number of wireless access points—both indoors and outdoors.

This plays a major role in bringing device-based LBS accuracy up to that of GPS solutions, for both indoor and outdoor environments, by simply tracking mobile users by cell or location identifier.

Aside from being technologically superior to previous solutions, device- and network-driven LBS will bring significant realworld changes: businesses such as logistics companies, public transport operators and credit card companies will be able to make use of improved geo-fenced location data to advance their services. For home delivery services, customers will be able to get accurate information on the location of the associated courier and detailed insight into when an item will arrive.

In addition, when it comes to detecting credit card and banking fraud, customers and banks will be able to determine both the time and physical location of all transactions. Having this information available in real time will highlight transaction anomalies and better determine the location and identity of those responsible.

Based on the number of smartphone users worldwide, there are more than 150 million users of LBS—and potential target customers for mobile advertisers.

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And this is just the beginning: In the increasingly connected world of IoT and M2M, LBS technology is expected to play a major role in the development and management of smart cities. Governments and local authorities will soon be able to use LBS to generate a real-time heat map that shows the dynamics of a city’s population over the course of a day. Such information could be invaluable when it comes to designing related facilities and infrastructure; determining the locations of key transport routes and accurately determining the capacity required during peak travel times.

HOW CAN SERVICE PROVIDERS BENEFIT FROM LBS? The good news for service providers is that LBS data is already available on existing networks; most service providers use this data every day to help troubleshoot service- and customer-impacting issues. However, the value LBS data represents to other groups within the service provider’s organization, such as marketing and sales, could be invaluable.

Leveraging this data will not only improve the breadth of services available and, more significantly, enable the service provider to better target potential customers for a wide range of products or services.

So what drives the ability to accurately determine a customer’s location? In today’s consumer environment, marketing and advertising represents the largest expense of most retail-based organizations selling everything from the latest product technology to simple household necessities like food and clothing.

Right now, mobile advertising is largely generic and often restricted to browser-embedded advertising based on previous search history. Although relevant, this can be intrusive. Having the ability to personalize product- and service-based advertising based on customer location or proximity, as well as actual interest, represents a significant improvement in reaching a specific target audience. It also represents a more effective spend in advertising budget.

A recent study published by eMarketer titled, “Location Intelligence, H1 2016: Guidance for US Marketers on Consumer Behavior, Data Quality and Mobile Marketing Tactics” estimated that the number of smartphone users would increase 8.7% in 2016, and the number of those who use LBS is expected to rise at near equal pace.

According to eMarketer, 90% of the same survey respondents used some form of LBS during 2015, ranging from weather- and news-based applications to dedicated consumer-based marketing or advertising. Based on the number of smartphone users worldwide, this represents more than 150 million users of LBS—and potential target customers.

For service providers, this opens up a new revenue stream: Access to customer location information in real time will be the key enabler for targeted advertising and media. And is now information that the Service Provider can resell, albeit, anonymized to protect customer and subscriber identity.

US smartphone owners who have used location-based services. eMarketer, Location Intelligence, H1 2016

90

%

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HOW EMPIRIX ENABLES LBS The Empirix Customer Experience Assurance (CEA) solution utilizes class-leading monitoring architecture to enable service providers to gain insights into their customer bases. Either for troubleshooting purposes or understanding the related, Customer Experience of all mobile Services and Applications.

Through deployment of hardware or software probes, the Empirix CEA solution taps key monitoring points in the service providers’ network. The solution then extracts all messaging associated with a specific customer’s interaction with the network as they use services including voice, messaging and data as well as OTT applications and content. These messages are correlated into transactions (or data records known as xDRs) for any mobile access technology—2G, 3G and 4G—as well as technologies such as Wi-Fi. The actual content of each transaction varies. Depending on the type of interaction the customer has, combined with the mobile access technology type, these transactions can include dimensions like customer and device identification, service and technology utilized, and identification of related network elements or components over which the transaction and messaging flows. The transactions can also include cell or location identifiers. It is these dimensions in particular that combine with customer information to drive external LBS and their host platforms.

In order to enable rapid integration with LBS, Empirix has developed a number of key functions within its CEA solution, specifically its mediation platform, to generate transactions, in real time, that contain only the host platform’s required information. By offering a flexible mediation platform capable of extracting, correlating, and transporting customer location information in a real-time, consistent, and structured manner, the Empirix solution decreases the time to market for any project centered on LBS. For a mobile service provider, this can result in early service uptake and an increase in market share. More significantly, it can result in revenue being recognized quicker, reducing the typical time to realize a return on investment (ROI).

Key functionality and related benefits of the Empirix mediation platform include: uu

orrelation of multiple xDRs into C a single EDR (event detail record), enabling a reduction in the volume of data to be processed by the downstream application

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nrichment of the xDRs with E key reference data, resulting in a more application- and businessorientated data output, reducing the processing requirements of the end application

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ediation of the xDRs into M multiple output formats, resulting in less processing by the end application and enabling a “plug and play” integration approach

For further information on Empirix and how it can enable LBS, please contact us at www.empirix.com.

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