Recently there have been a huge wave of public outcry on Carrier IQ's embedded CEM solution in the US. The issue is now even being called for congressional hearing as Lawmakers seek hearing on Carrier IQ privacy issues. The controversy on this is best summarized by Jaikumar Vijayan's article behind the issue and an article by Zachary Lutz explains what it is all about.
What does this mean for us who are in the telecoms industry? Does this mean that we should now all drop our CEM solutions because of privacy concerns? To my little world I believe we should not, but we should also avoid the pitfalls that carrier IQ have gotten themselves into. Managing customer experience is important to the network operators to ensure they deliver the best service and the correct level of service to each subscriber. It is equallly important to subscribers so they do not get bombarded with advertisement and offers that they do not want aside from the satisfaction of a good mobile / cellular network service.
Subscriber activities are actually being captured by the network even without the device agents by using network probes that records everything about a subscriber activity. This solution is not only expensive but can also be considered as breaking privacy laws, since it captures subscriber activity without the knowledge of the subscriber. The question to my mind is what CEM solution is actually efficient, effective and acceptable by subscribers or mobile phone users. There is no holy grail here but I can offer an answer. Native applications.
The main problem with embedded application or network probes is that the subscriber and phone user are not aware of the records being made, there is no opt-in or opt-out possibilities. With a native app the subscriber or phone user can easily install such CEM app if they want to and can easily remove it as well. Awareness I think is the key.
For network operators perhaps the best approach is to only have device agents on the subscriber phone to solve issues notice by the subscriber instead of recording everything the subscriber phone is doing. One such application is GEOptimA.
What does this mean for us who are in the telecoms industry? Does this mean that we should now all drop our CEM solutions because of privacy concerns? To my little world I believe we should not, but we should also avoid the pitfalls that carrier IQ have gotten themselves into. Managing customer experience is important to the network operators to ensure they deliver the best service and the correct level of service to each subscriber. It is equallly important to subscribers so they do not get bombarded with advertisement and offers that they do not want aside from the satisfaction of a good mobile / cellular network service.
Subscriber activities are actually being captured by the network even without the device agents by using network probes that records everything about a subscriber activity. This solution is not only expensive but can also be considered as breaking privacy laws, since it captures subscriber activity without the knowledge of the subscriber. The question to my mind is what CEM solution is actually efficient, effective and acceptable by subscribers or mobile phone users. There is no holy grail here but I can offer an answer. Native applications.
The main problem with embedded application or network probes is that the subscriber and phone user are not aware of the records being made, there is no opt-in or opt-out possibilities. With a native app the subscriber or phone user can easily install such CEM app if they want to and can easily remove it as well. Awareness I think is the key.
For network operators perhaps the best approach is to only have device agents on the subscriber phone to solve issues notice by the subscriber instead of recording everything the subscriber phone is doing. One such application is GEOptimA.
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